Shimmering Details, Volume I
A Memoir
ISBN10: 0374174598
ISBN13: 9780374174590
Hardcover
576 Pages
$37.50
CA$50.00
“Instead of a chronicle, a person tends to manufacture legends when he relates the story of his life for others,” Péter Nádas writes in his fiction masterpiece, Parallel Stories. Now, in his illuminating memoir, Shimmering Details, the renowned author investigates what it means to reconstruct a life without recourse to the techniques and embellishments of traditional storytelling.
Taking his firmly imbedded memories—the “shimmering details” that give this work its title—as his starting point, Nádas dissects them using a method inspired by Freudian dream interpretation. Sounds, scenes, smells, feelings—all are probed for details that might allow him to reconstruct what happened, and when and where. In order to avoid conscious or unconscious distortions, he deconstructs the stories of others, too—moving in concentric circles toward cause and effect, until their meaning and significance come to light.
In Shimmering Details, Volume I, Nádas probes the history of his family from the late 19th century to his birth in 1942 and beyond. In a work that encompasses World War II and the Hungarian Revolution, Nádas traces the hidden connections between the seemingly random events of a life and assembles them into a memoir like no other.
Reviews
Praise for Shimmering Details, Volume I
"Péter Nádas is the great surveyor of 20th-century European mental landscapes . . . One moment he is breathtakingly microscopic, offering a feast of details and nuances, and the next moment he is epochal and essayistic . . . An unsurpassable work of art."―Iris Radisch, Die Zeit
"A firework of memories, in which each spark unfolds in its own luminosity and, above all, triggers further memories . . . [A] masterpiece . . . [Nádas is] one of the greatest writers of our time."―Andreas Platthaus, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
WHEN ON WEDNESDAY
THERE WERE NO IFS, ands, or buts about it, Sunday lunch had to be served punctually at noon. When the church bell rang out, the boiling hot soup had to be on the table. Not that Grandad wanted it like that. I’m...