First and foremost, helloooo from London. I have spent the week wandering about, doing a mix of touristy and non-touristy things. (Where does shopping at H&M fit in?) This morning, however, is about finding a coffee shop and reading my book.
What is my vacation book, you ask? Well, it's a tome: A Book of Memories, by Peter Nadas, a Hungarian writer. Originally published in the mid-1980s, it has that strange Eastern European intellectual coming to terms with a totalitarian regime by avoiding it sort of vibe. (See: Milan Kundera) Also like Kundera, Nadas is a very sensual and sexual writer. Memories is a mix of memoirs, which mix and intertwine until I sometimes am not sure who is talking. His main character, to this point, is a young writer who grew up in Stalinist and post-Stalinist Hungary, and is lately of East Berlin. He is beautiful and seductive, and emotional and sensitive and yet manipulative and almost sadistic. And sexually, it seems he is drawn to most everyone, and most everyone is drawn to him. Yet this doesn't come off as crude, as it might in other hands.
Nadas is a beautiful stylist, yet the prose can be difficult for an English-speaking reader. It is flowery, and looooong, which sentences extending for lines and lines, and paragraphs for pages. Plus, while not quite stream-of-consciousness, the narrators will break off on detailed tangents, and then return to their central narrative without missing a beat. (Whether the reader can do so remains to be seen.)
I marked a few passages from the first third of the novel, but most of them are either so long, or so unclear out of context, that I will limit myself to sharing just one:
Like every moment we want to be significant, this one, too, turns out to be insignificant; we have to remind ourselves afterward that what we have been waiting for so eagerly is actually here, has finally come, and nothing has changed, everything is the same, it's simply here, the waiting is over.
1 comment:
You, of course, have gone to book stores, no? At the very least a brief trip to Charing Cross Road is in order (although I imagine it is a shadow of its former bibliophilic glory... I know the largest book shop whose name escapes me at the moment went bankrupt in the 90s, leaving me with an unpaid invoice for a couple hundred bucks). I've never been to Cambridge, but I found Oxford to be a great bookstore town. Haye-on-Wye is supposed to be overwhelming in its inventory, but again, I've never been.
And of course, I can never hear the phrase "Merrie Olde England" without thinking of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim.
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