Péter Nádas is better known abroad than any other contemporary Hungarian writer. This ambitious book, which caused a sensation when it was published in Hungary in 1986 (after years of delay as the censors ruminated on it), is his ‘Big Novel’ in every sense of the word. It weighs in at over seven hundred pages and treats the big themes of love and death and identity and what have you. It is also beautifully written, often tragic, sometimes comic. And it is well served by the very readable translation, done from an amended version published after the end of communism and its censors. Not always an easy read, thanks partly to its complexity, partly to Nádas’ predilection for paragraph-length sentences and chapter-length paragraphs. But his eye for the telling detail as well as the broad sweep — he earned his living as a cameraman before concentrating on writing — creates memorable vignettes and makes you feel the colour and texture of people’s lives, so that you are swept along by the narrative, or rather narratives.

You don’t realise at first that you are reading two separate and sometimes interlocking first-person narratives, though neither proceeds in the traditional chronological way. In one a contemporary writer recalls his 1950s childhood and adolescence in rigidly Stalinist Hungary and, most dramatically, the 1956 uprising, shortly followed by the suicide of his father, a state prosecutor — there are clear parallels here with Nádas’ own life — and his years in East Berlin where his lover is Melchior, a German poet and radio journalist. In the other narrative the first (unnamed) narrator’s fictional character Thomas Thoenissen, a bisexual German dandy and anarchist living at the turn of the nineteenth century, is the main protagonist, and his story often mirrors the first. By the end of the novel a third narrator has emerged, graceful, elegant Krisztián, whom our first narrator had loved when he was a boy — we met him in the early pages. He now completes the story, as well as offering his own (sometimes contradictory) version of the earlier narrative.

Although this is often said to be the first openly homosexual novel to be published in Hungary, heterosexual love is by no means absent. In fact some of the most erotic scenes describe Thomas Thoenissen’s relationship with his fiancée, and the contemporary narrator is involved in East Berlin with a colourful actress called Thea, who is also Melchior’s lover. Altogether this is a challenging read, but it is a challenge well worth taking up.

I stopped talking, abruptly, as if I had something more to say but had no idea what I could add or how I got entangled in the story, which suddenly seemed false, alien, and far removed from me; we kept walking, listening to the even sound of our footsteps, Melchior asked no questions and I was glad I didn’t have to say another word.

And in this silence punctuated by our footsteps which was not really silence but the absence of appropriate words, I felt that everything I’d said until then was nothing but idle talk, just words, an impenetrable and superfluous heap of empty words, foreign to me, not bending to my tongue; it was senseless to talk without the proper words, and there were none, not even in my native vocabulary, that would lead somewhere in this story, nowhere to go in the story, for there is no story when compulsive memory continually bogs down in insignificant details or details imagined to be meaningless; at that moment, for example, in my mind I was wandering about the old Marx Square in Budapest waiting for Father, and of course he didn’t show up, and still I couldn’t tear myself away from there — but why would I tell Melchior about that ?

One can only tell the story of something, and I wanted to tell him everything, the whole of the story all at once, to transfer it, place it in his body, vomit it into this great love of mine, but where did that elusive whole begin and end? how could it be created in a language that had nothing to do with my body and weighed so heavily on my tongue? 501