Eisenberg also covers The Book of Memories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), a novel whose principal feature, according to the reviewer, is the exacting scrutiny in describing the fullness of each instant of experience. When finishing the book, she writes, she felt ”irreversibly altered, as if the author had adjusted, with a set of tiny wrenches, molecular components of my brain.”

 

Eisenberg considers the collection under review as an excellent introduction to the work of Nádas, six of whose books have been published in English translation so far – four by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one by Twisted Spoon Press, and one by Steindl). (His most recent novel, the 1,500-page Parallel Stories, published in 2005 – mistakenly dated for 1995 by the article – has not been translated yet.) She praises Nádas’s ”ferocious intellect, his profound humanism, his skill in depicting a scene, and his ingenuity in structuring thoughts and impressions.”

 

Most of the pieces in the collection had been written before the change of regime in 1989, some as early as the 60s. The article reflects on how writing in a dictatorship shapes the way someone writes. Repression, while being less than enviable, nevertheless has a beneficial effect on the relationship between writer and audience, not to mention the weight a writer’s word carries. In the West, Eisenberg notes, ”in our life of the moment, which is both highly politicized and highly commodified, whatever we have to say is in danger of being transmuted, as soon as it hits the paper, into something trivial and inessential,” whereas the samisdat readership of Eastern Europe under Communist rule ”looked to literature in a more or less devotional spirit, for reflections and illuminations of the world it lived in but was forbidden to observe or speak of directly.”