Parallel Stories (First Edition)

Peter Nadas (author); Imre Goldstein (translation)

ISBN 10: 0374229767 / ISBN 13: 9780374229764

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York), 2011

About this Item

FSG, New York, 2011. First American edition. First printing. A pristine unread copy, very fine in all respects. Comes with mylar dust jacket protector. Shipped in sturdy box. Smoke-free shop. Purchased new, never even opened. You cannot find a better copy. Octavo, 1,152 pages. Translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein. The novel, which took 18 years to write, appeared in Hungary in 2005 and was published in English as one volume in 2011. A monumental novel, Nadas' magnum opus, weaving together the lives of Hungarian and German families across the 20th century, solidifying Nádas's reputation as one of Europe s most profound literary voices. This is Nádas s third novel, following "The End of a Family Story" and "A Book of Memories." originally published in Hungary in 2005 as "Párhuzamos történetek." F4100.

Seller Inventory # 05-2013-68

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Parallel Stories (First Edition)
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York)
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374229767
• ISBN 13: 9780374229764
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New
• Seller catalogs:
  • Hungarian Literature

About this title

Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011


In 1989, the year the Wall came down, a university student in Berlin on his morning run finds a corpse on a park bench and alerts the authorities. This scene opens a novel of extraordinary scope and depth, a masterwork that traces the fate of myriad Europeans—Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Gypsies—across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century.

Three unusual men are at the heart of Parallel Stories: Hans von Wolkenstein, whose German mother is linked to secrets of fascist-Nazi collaboration during the 1940s; Ágost Lippay Lehr, whose influential father has served Hungary's different political regimes for decades; and András Rott, who has his own dark record of mysterious activities abroad. The web of extended and interconnected dramas reaches from 1989 back to the spring of 1939, when Europe trembled on the edge of war, and extends to the bestial times of 1944–45, when Budapest was besieged, the Final Solution devastated Hungary's Jews, and the war came to an end, and on to the cataclysmic Hungarian Revolution of October 1956. We follow these men from Berlin and Moscow to Switzerland and Holland, from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, and of course, from village to city in Hungary. The social and political circumstances of their lives may vary greatly, their sexual and spiritual longings may seem to each of them entirely unique, yet Péter Nádas's magnificent tapestry unveils uncanny reverberating parallels that link them across time and space.This is Péter Nádas's masterpiece—eighteen years in the writing, a sensation in Hungary even before it was published, and almost four years in the translating. Parallel Stories is the first foreign translation of this daring, demanding, and momentous novel, and it confirms for an even larger audience what Hungary already knows: that it is the author's greatest work.

About the Author

Péter Nádas was born in Budapest in 1942. Among his works translated into English are the novels A Book of Memories (FSG, 1997), The End of a Family Story (FSG, 1998), and Love (FSG, 2000); a collection of stories and essays, Fire and Knowledge (FSG, 2007); and two pieces of short fiction, A Lovely Tale of Photography and Péter Nádas: Own Death. He lives with his wife in Gombosszeg, Hungary.