{"id":285206,"date":"2011-05-19T20:37:49","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T20:37:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2011\/05\/19\/peter-nadas-his-new-book\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:23:50","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:23:50","slug":"peter-nadas-his-new-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2011\/05\/19\/peter-nadas-his-new-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Nadas & His New Book"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the fall books that I’m interested in checking out is Peter Nadas’s Parallel Stories<\/em>, an extremely long trilogy (like 1200 pages long) that’s coming out from FSG<\/span> this October. <\/p>\n

This week, in FSG<\/span>’s consistently interesting Works in Progress<\/a> newsletter has an interview with Nadas about this new book.<\/a> Here’s an excerpt:<\/p>\n

\n

This fall FSG<\/span> will publish Parallel Stories<\/em> by acclaimed Hungarian author P\u00e9ter N\u00e1das. Editor Elizabeth Sifton writes, \u201cAfter his last novel, A Book of Memories<\/em>, appeared in English in 1997, many critics and readers agreed with Susan Sontag\u2019s assessment that it was the greatest novel written in postwar Europe. But N\u00e1das was already moving past that signal achievement. And now we can see how Parallel Stories\u2014which took eighteen years to write, N\u00e1das has said, and appeared in Budapest in 2005\u2014extends and deepens the scope of his fiction, both in historical terms and in the most intimate, hidden terms of body and soul. The multilevel narrative reaches back to the 1930s, thickens in the crisis seasons of 1944\u201345, 1956, and 1961, and thrusts forward to 1989; and at every point we experience the intense and daring ways that the men and women he so memorably creates live through or transcend, create or deny the brutalities of their strife-torn times. This is a great novel about the twentieth century and, with its dazzling formal innovations and daring candor, a postmodern novel for the twenty-first.\u201d [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Csaba K\u00e1rolyi: You wrote an article called \u201cStructure and Plot Patterns in Parallel Stories,\u201d in which you formulated the creative problem at the crux of the novel. You wrote: \u201cI could no longer escape the thought that prose writing actually works as the maid-servant of causal thinking.\u201d Your aim was \u201cto write the stories of people who can\u2019t ever have met, who have only a very superficial knowledge of each other, and yet interfere most profoundly with each other\u2019s lives.\u201d I can see that your characters are intertwined even more closely than that, though, and still, the whole thing does not fall to pieces or become chaotic. As if the plan had been more radical than its realization. And in any case the reader will insist on deciphering on a causal basis, no matter what.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

P\u00e9ter N\u00e1das: And they will succeed, too. I try to leave open the points that offer clues for this deciphering. Not in all cases, though.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

We constantly strive to control the effect of our words or actions. The question is what sort of qualities this effort produces in other people. I have no guarantees concerning the perceptions of others. I tried to take all of this into account when I created connections between the different people, plot lines, or historical periods.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

And then some systems are identical, others are similar, and yet others are different. We can say that people act along similar or even identical lines because they had similar upbringings or are constitutionally alike. And there are also differences according to these criteria\u2014when, for example, you do something or other not because that\u2019s the way you were socialized, but because you\u2019re going against your socialization, following your instincts, or acting upon
\nyour convictions. People can have direct and strong interactions; there are cases of both direct and indirect impact: when A has influenced B but does not know C, who was influenced by B, then, although A doesn\u2019t know it, he or she actually influenced C. A causal relationship always tries to stick to being unequivocal, but I tried not to lose sight of the multivalence of things. This naturally yielded structures that no longer fit into the structure of causal thinking. Naturally, causation isn\u2019t entirely absent but it falls into a totally different context or exists in a different space from the start.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The whole interview can be found here.<\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the fall books that I’m interested in checking out is Peter Nadas’s Parallel Stories, an extremely long trilogy (like 1200 pages long) that’s coming out from FSG this October. This week, in FSG’s consistently interesting Works in Progress newsletter has an interview with Nadas about this new book. Here’s an excerpt: This fall […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[1976,3996,40706,1966],"class_list":["post-285206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-fsg","tag-hungarian-literature","tag-parallel-stories","tag-peter-nadas"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285206"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":344066,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285206\/revisions\/344066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}