The kind who love to take any opportunity to trivialize experimental writing, even while granting that it may, in more benighted times, have served a purpose--though god knows it's only an indulgence today. These are the critics who point out their beloved naturalistic moments in David Foster Wallace then heave a sigh at having to sidestep all the metafictional masturbation to get to a moment or two of sharply rendered detail. Nothing wrong with enjoying a moment of recognition, but I can't help but think that something has damaged these critics' sense of curiosity.
Anyway, Peter Nadas is well-known for his hefty A Book of Memories, but I read this work instead to see what he's up to--it's short, at least. A Lovely Tale, translated from Hungarian by Imre Goldstein, hovers around Kornelia, a photographer, and her time spent in a sanatorium surrounded by a cast of cipher-like characters. Her problems evidently come straight out of commedia dell'arte: she is engaged to a baron who wants her money, yet she loves a young writer she cannot have. So she escapes into illness. She may, in fact, be a creature narrated by another photographer who seems to be finding a way to tell his own death. If so, it helps explain the stilted portentousness which sometimes weighs a bit heavily in this work:
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"Whenever I think of my future, I think of your fate."
"Neither has anything to learn from the other."
"And if I combined the two?"
"My fate would still not save you from your own."