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Who needs another 700page-long Central European novel? It is a fair question. But this particular 700-page-long Central European novel is very likely the book that you have been awaiting since you read Remembrance of Things Past, The Magic Mountain or The Man Without Qualities. I am serious. If you allow yourself to be put off by this book, by its length or its seriousness of purpose or its origin in one of those exasperatingly small and troublesome countries stuck somewhere in the middle of Europe, you may be denying yourself one of the most rewarding reading experiences of your lifetime. If a masterpiece is a book that makes us wonder how we could have claimed to understand our own existence before we read it, then Peter Nadas's book is unquestionably a masterpiece.
The unmistakable sense of discovery with which this book is going to leave every American reader who lays his or her hands on it, except for the really hopeless admirers of Tom Clancy's prose, rings a joyful and (as is the case with all genuine discoveries) a sad note. We rejoice at having discovered a great book and a great writer; we are saddened by our realization that we owe our joy in part to our ignorance. How was it possible that most of us never heard of this book's and this writer's existence? Where are all the Reader's Encyclopedias and Internets when you need them? And how many comparable achievements of world literature get overlooked each year and are doomed to obscurity for the simple reason that they are written in Estonian or Farsi rather than English or French?
Nadas's magnum opus appears in English after a considerable delay, eleven years after its original publication; but here is at least one masterpiece that has not been overlooked. More, it is now available in a translation that can only be called exemplary. Even a reader who knows no Hungarian can appreciate the degree of difficulty that faced Ivan Sanders and Imre Goldstein as they tried to preserve Nadas's precision of language and complexity of thought. Consider just one of hundreds of possible examples, a single long sentence that describes the protagonist's father, a Stalinist prosecutor, as he comes home from his office alarmed...