Shimmering Details, Volume I: A Memoir

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The magnum opus of one of Europe's greatest living writers. "Instead of a chronicle, a person tends to manufacture legends when he relates the story of his life for others," Pter Ndas 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, Ndas 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, Ndas 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, Ndas traces the hidden connections between the seemingly random events of a life and assembles them into a memoir like no other.

Reviews

"Pter Ndas 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 . . . [Ndas is] one of the greatest writers of our time." Andreas Platthaus, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Author Bio

Pter Ndas was born in Budapest in 1942. Among his works translated into English are the novels Parallel Stories, A Book of Memories, The End of a Family Story, and Love, as well as a collection of stories and essays, Fire and Knowledge; A Lovely Tale of Photography; and Pter Ndas: Own Death. He lives with his wife in Gombosszeg, in western Hungary. Judith Sollosy is an editor and an academic and literary translator who is best known for her translations of the contemporary Hungarian authors Pter Esterhzy, Mihly Kornis, Pter Ndas, and Istvn rkny.