Parallel Stories

'An ornate secular monstrosity that must rank as one of his country's strangest, most ambitious literary achievements. Parallel Stories is a book about capitalism and the Church, about communism and no Church; Hungarian nationalists and Jewish lumber merchants; gay intelligence officers in Budapest bathhouse bacchanals and Gypsy Gastarbeiters. All of Magyardom seems to be in it, along with wide demographic swaths of Italy, France, Austria, and, especially, Germany... That narrative proliferation is purposeful. The reader must not merely confront but veritably experience -- character by character, decade by decade -- a half-century of European totalitarianism, which, in its mission to organise and ennoble life on the Continent, succeeded only in destroying it.'