As the narrator says: 'There is no memory without the recurrence of emotions, or conversely, every moment of lived experience is also an allusion to a former experience - that is what memory is.' I started it and for the first 100 pages it left me unmoved. Then, without warning, my attention surrendered to it and its exhilaration kicked in - in the most quiet and understated way.

Undoubtedly, this translation from the original Hungarian text, in which you can almost sense the painstaking consideration given to ensuring the correct English word is substituted, helps.

Yet at times the prose tends overly towards the self-indulgent, so that short sentences become unnecessarily long, and the essence of what the author is trying to say wallows in a sea of text.

It also does not help that, as is the case with memories, they do not occur in chronological order, so there is much skipping backwards and forwards.

As a result, the themes - and there are many - become obscured.

It opens with the narrator's recollection of his childhood in Budapest, with a backdrop of the 1956 uprising against the communists.

His mother is dying of cancer, the man he understands to be his father - a state prosecutor who later commits suicide - may in fact not be, and his loving sister is battling a mental disability.

Struggling with the upheavals of adolescence, he admires and is attracted to his schoolfriend Krisztian, portrayed as an aloof character.

Yet he is also more than a little interested in Maja, a girlfriend with whom he indulges his sexual proclivities.

In many ways, this section is the most human and most touching.

The narrator alludes to his mother's and sister's illness, speaks of finding his 'father' in a tryst with the maid, and conveys simply the confusion that the man he is so proud of may not be his biological father.

The observances all have a beautiful, surreal quality - reflecting the fact they occurred long ago, yet the smallest detail does not escape attention.

Another strand portrays the narrator in East Berlin in the early 1970s, where he is moving in Bohemian circles, his affections torn between an actress, Thea Sandstuhl, and a poet named Melchior Thoenissen, who is desperate to escape to the West.

Set against the backdrop of the Cold War, there is a wonderfully atmospheric sequence in which a landlady vents her suspicions on the narrator, who is her lodger.

The irony is exquisite, bearing in mind he is from Hungary - a friend of East Germany's - yet such is the overwhelming presence of the state.

And in the parts featuring the narrator and Melchior, the prose dazzles with sensuality.

Perhaps the third part is the least inspiring, focusing on a novel the narrator is writing.

It appears as if the narrator is wishing to put his own experiences down on paper in an attempt to examine and understand them, so that the text ambles rather than flows.

The fourth strand is written after the narrator's death and is penned by Krisztian, the narrator's childhood friend who now owns the memoirs and the manuscript of the novel.

The contrast in writing style is marked. Clearly, Krisztian is a product of a totalitarian society and seems as though he suffers from tunnel vision and has an infertile imagination.

And yet like much else in this book nothing is as it seems. What gradually emerges is that this is only a defence mechanism with which he can manage an unhappy life.

It is difficult to sum up a novel with such a broad remit and no doubt some would say that doing so would insult its purpose.

But perhaps, if one were forced to, it would go something like this: Experience too much and too deeply, and it will drive you to the brink of insanity.

Avoid it and life in all its technicolour glory is reduced to little more than a monochromatic limbo.

Really, in many ways, the book is as simple as that.