In this slight 1979 novel by the acclaimed Hungarian author of A Book of Memories (1997), a nameless lover attempts to leave his mistress, smokes dope and glides soporifically out of “the time which I’ve up to now believed to be reality,” and considers the possibility that this amorphous fugue state makes more tolerable the emotional conflicts imposed by the quotidian. Nothing else happens, in a draggy pseudofiction buttressed with exclamatory redundancy, rhetorical questions, and skewed typography. “It feels as if I’m having a conversation with myself,” the narrator dreamily observes. Alas, it does—and few readers will be inclined to eavesdrop. Nádas at his best is a lot better than this.
