Parallel stories / Péter Nádas ; translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein.

Includes bibliographical references.

Make no mistake, this is a magnum opus, with the operative word being magnum. Nadas (A Book of Memories) is said to have spent 15 years in the writing, and his sweep is both grand and minute. He describes a simple sex act in excruciating detail for endless pages, then plunges without transition into different historical eras. His purview is Europe from mid-20th century forward, with much attention to the carnage and destruction visited upon his native Hungary during World War II and the revolution of 1956 against communist rule and Soviet control. But while detailing this, he's likely to cut to a conversation among friends in a Budapest apartment, and his prose here can be as repetitive and banal as it is revealing. Apparently a principal aim is to show how the stories of his various characters are related even if they don't intersect. Curiously, there is not a single question mark in this probing work.