Parallel Stories

I'm reading Péter Nádas.  'I have spent my life between imagination and reality' is the translated catch-phrase that comes up in an internet search, from a widely-seen brief interview in his native language.  Years ago, I read the Book of Memories which was highly praised by Susan Sontag and described as Proustian; it was well worth the time investment. 

This time it's Parallel Stories--  received with mixed reviews. Among these were comments on the more-than-1100 pages as 'not quite the disaster of Brodkey's Runaway Soul' (which I managed to complete), but flawed.  It took 18 years to write. Like Mann's Joseph quartet-- also under-read at some 1500 pages, the author considers this his masterpiece.  I respect that, often consider the fact that the best songs I think I have ever written receive the fewest 'listens' on streaming media.  

It's hard to explain the attraction these huge novels have for me-- Proust, Mann, Bolaño, Gaddis, etc... even David Foster Wallace, more recently. As my personal hourglass runs down, the blessing of my well-stocked bookshelves and stacks and piles of run-over compels me... while I still have the bandwidth, although one never knows when one's capacity takes a hit; my memory for long-ago titles, plots, etc... is failing. 

More than any event in my life, the pandemic altered the wiring of my brain.  Grief, shock, solitude-- the coincidence of age and eventlessness... changed things.  I found myself distance-walking often-- monologuing, singing to myself-- inventing narratives and weaving a sort of quasi-literary alter-ego in my head.  Some of these voices wrote themselves into poems-- as though all I did was transcribe.  But once the trauma of grief left me with a little peace, I substituted the intimacy of authorial narrators of literature... they became my deep companions. 

Long novels allow the writers to wander down corridors of memory, to pursue tangents beyond what one normally allows in daily life. Some of these are obsessive and uber-technical; others autopsy old loves, bare and dissect already-naked moments to the point of repulsion.  Criticism of Parallel Stories highlights  the more awkward passages and there are some truly cringeworthy ones.  Readers who grew up on Joyce are accustomed to explicit familiarity with body functions and explorations.  Few pursue these long novels for prurience or eroticism; there is way too much of that imminently accessible in all media.

But generally, I trust these writers-- I forgive them their excesses and cannot fathom the editing.  Nádas alleges that he writes in longhand and an assistant transfers to computer.  Then there are the translators. Being a diligent reader, I sometimes look at maps of Budapest and Berlin-- I brush up on the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Politics, history--  are the fundamentals and rediscovering is part of the joy of unraveling these novels. European authors have wars and bloody legacies in their private visions. 

To put some disturbing icing on the 100-page chapter of tedious sexual excess I finished, last night I watched two Michel Haneke films.  My neighbor-- a writer-- is a huge fan of Funny Games and recommended these. So, The Seventh Continent was just a brilliantly visual piece of cinematic art with very little dialogue that pulled through to what you knew would be a horrifying end... but still you kept on.  These films of personal horror-- the exploration of the range of evil-- of cruelty and sadism-- done not like Hollywood but with a sort of chilling matter-of-fact quiet-- well, they haunt one.

My physical therapist and I spend most of our sessions talking about literature.  He has just finished Paradise Lost and went on to Céline and Henry Miller.  It occurs, as he torments me in the name of rehabilitation, there's a kind of ironic parallel to the things we watch and read.  The possibilities and random incidents in a city- -the falls, the accidents, the smashes and crashes.. and the episodic street violence... discourages some people from taking daily risks.  The catalogue of films and movies-- the gore and blood and terror-- has surely anesthetized us to the massive global human suffering we see on the news.  And still I heard my neighbor scream when she cut her finger mildly with a kitchen knife... and a woman who fell off her scooter today-- nothing besides a bruised pair of leggings.  But the screams-- they stayed with me. 

These massive historical novels, years past the events they reflect, remind not only of the horrific immediacy of battlegrounds-- of the aggressive and shameful human tendencies wars and violence force men to summon... but of the consequence... of the future.  It's not the event but the echoes, going forward-- the psychological scars and warped behaviors we humans tend to invent to somehow repair old wounds we never deserved in the first place.  Impossible to go through life unscathed, but so much we could do in the name of prevention. Football players wear so much padding; the rest of us-- especially the children of war... are so unprotected.  When the blood dries and the limbs heal-- or not-- there will be some indelible residue of evil-- of endless disturbing parallel stories.