There is something about the fiction of Eastern Europe that is both marvelous and undefinable. Milan Kundara's Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kadare's Three-Arched Bridge (above) do so much more than tell a story and draw characters. They define places and moods with great style and subtlety. Hungarian novelist George Konrad's A Feast in the Garden falls into this marvelous class of books. The "story" Konrad tells is not linear, and might not be considered even a story at all, the way it switches from place to place, time to time, and character to character. It is a serious work, dealing both with the pogrom of the Jews under the Nazis and Soviet oppression during the 50's and 60's, but the author's tone is not one of unremitting grief.

Like the Kundara novel, I believe this book might best be read on a series of summer afternoons, at a European sidewalk cafe, as people pass and friends drop by. The cafe is important to Konrad's world.

One brief description, by the intellectual womanizer Janos while visiting Jerusalem, is worth quoting in full: "There he was, a city loafer, sitting in an Arab cafe in Jerusalem because he could not find a decent Eastern European Jewish cafe. How can one wait for the Messiah without a decent cafe? Where do you think the Messiah would go first, where would he start his preaching? In such a cafe, obviously." Many more such delights await the reader of this fine book.

"A Lovely Tale of Photography" is the third work of Peter Nadas to be translated into English, following the Hungarian writer's monumental "A Book of Memories" (1997) and "The End of a Family Story" (1998). One might be misled by the slimness of the current volume (120pp) into believing it to be his most accessible work; however, it is truly a complex piece that is the descendant of the previous two. The book is described as "an hallucinatory novella" and to the extent that we are presented with a plot we see the portrait of a female photographer as she suffers through an illness; her life appears to pass as a series of pictures - random images and people, sounds, colors, darkness and light. Nadas continues to confront of notions of time, place, and character, stripping these concepts down to their essences in order to explore them. Yet I would argue that this work more resembles a movie - not a silent movie, but a moving picture whose sound is turned down, such that we know that some element is missing from this world; we strain to hear it, but can only discern the screams and the cries as we watch the pictures fly past our eyes. This trick is successful for its limited purpose, unfortunately we are left yearning for more - we are only presented with hints of a love affair, of the woman's fears and her dreams and we suspect that the truth has somehow eluded us in the silence. Thus, I do not believe this to be Nadas' strongest work, but it is a worthy addition to his previous efforts and certainly valuable to any reader who wishes to join Nadas on his search for meaning.

This book is very well written in an innovative style - small sections of very visually detailed segments - amazing writing of the world as viewed thru a photographer's eyes. The only narrative dislocation this caused was that it took me some time to place the story in time sufficiently to give the action context and social context is essential to following the story. I enjoyed the book - will probably reread it - but at the end of the book, I still cared nothing about the characters - this may be intentional on the part of the author as it is consistent with the photographer's inability to deal with the world outside the photograph of it.

The good use of memory: this book teaches how to patch together a tapestry of stories, and make it all worthwhile. By inventing a fantastic world of myths and legends, the main character of this beautiful novel defeats the condemnation of silence and gives a passionate description of the drama that surrounds him: life itself, and the consciousness of a child, whom he tries save from a world of deception.

To begin, there are a few reasons I enjoyed this story of a childhood in a different part of the world: one, the interplay of childhood imagination with reality and second, the genealogical history of the family's heritage through beautiful stories told by the grandfather and by the child's witness to contemporary events.

Personally speaking, reading this beautiful story was an hypnotic experience. The interplay of close-up, magnified images through the young boy's encounters and observations with nature, family members, and related events as they involved his family, then himself and others add up to a sensitively written story set in tumultuous times, which are known only through the child's connection with them. Basically, the child-narrator's viewpoint prevails, allowing for a gentle ending. His early, childish imaginings in response to his new predicaments gain greater clarity (as they do also for this reader) as these situations grow both more familiar and, hence, more sharp. The crystally clear narrative seems to grow ever more icily transparent as his consciousness of them grows.

Differently from other novels that may feature several narrators on the track of a plausibly accurate explanation for a simple event shrouded in mystery, for example Iain Pears' INSTANCE OF THE FINGERPOST, THE END OF A FAMILY STORY is a solo piece that mostly moves ever forward in time along with the boy. Family stories told by the grandfather about the far past or impinging contemporary events only broaden the child's connectedness to his present situation.

THE END OF A FAMILY STORY leaves with a sense of release and playfulness. The balance however dubious at times seems to be safeguarded by the child's innocence. There is something good and hopeful in that state, and the denouement falls into line with it.

In summary, these merits in the narrative as well as the non-encounters, which the child does not know but which add subtle drama to this story of childhood, recommends itself to further exploration of Nadas' literature.

I read the first page of the book and was at once excited... as I got deeper into it, I felt I was descending into a thick fog. I read on, thinking I might emerge from this fog. I never did. I did not find this book to be a worthwhile read, especially considering its length. I did not learn a great deal about Cold War Hungary or Cold War politics that could not be found elsewhere. The book is almost pretentious, offers no real depth and left me wondering why I bothered. I mean no disrespect to the writer since it was obviously a labour for him to write. It is a solid book, but it failed to engage.

I was drawn into reading this book by the comparisons with Proust, which I don't think are really justified. It is a very good book, and has some superficial similarities, but I didn't find the same psychological insight in Nadas that Proust had. Nadas seems to have an exceptionally keen eye for external detail, and has many brilliant descriptions of things, but I don't think he has the same brilliance for interior, psychological details. A simple way to put it would be that where Proust writes about love, Nadas writes about sex.

The book also suffers from overly clever and elliptical story-telling, weaving together two distinct plots (which are confusingly both told in the first person, by very similar narrators), without clear indications of when it switches from one to the other. Nadas also adopts a faulkneresque non-linear narrative style, jumping around in time, which further confuses the issue. A few more concessions to readability would have benefitted the book enormously, in my opinion.

A last comment is that the book's central, climactic events hinge around the Hungarian revolution in 1950, but it assumes the reader already knows all the events of that period. If you don't know the timeline of events and the internal politics of Hungary during this turmoil, you would do well to brush up on it before reading Nadas's work.

I know that its difficult to read this long novel, but if you read it once, you'll never forget it! This book of Nádas Péter is one of the greatest Hungarian and Europian novel! Its an excellent philosophical, psychical, and historic work, so I recommend it to everyone. I read it in its original language, but I think that the English version is must be great as well. If you like Thomas Mann's, Proust's or Musil's works you will surely enjoy this one.

I cannot say this is the worst book I have read in some time; for there are others I never bothered to finish. However, "Love", by Peter Nadas is the worst book I have finished in a very long time. The following is an example of what passes for writing, "I am here. All right. Not here but there. But Where?" The last time I read words like these was during a Dr. Seuss book, except his made sense. "The Cat In The Hat" is Nobel Prize level literature compared to this.

As the jacket explains the book opens with a couple indulging in the most painfully assembled THC laced cigarettes ever to be described. In the time Eva and her TLC has made one Tobacco/THC amalgam, the drivel in the book can be read. This collection of words is the result of an Author reaching for subjects that he is about 100 I.Q. points shy of understanding much less analyzing. I suppose this could be written off as some rambling incoherent result of having a very low tolerance to cigarettes of any kind, but that is presuming too much.

There was one moment of clarity bordering on brilliance when the Author wrote, "I've gone nuts. Crazy, and lost". I could not agree with him more.