Shimmering Details, Volume I: A Memoir

The magnum opus of one of Europe's greatest living writers. "When telling one's life story to someone else one manufactures not chronicles but legends for oneself," P ter N das 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 embedded memories--the "shimmering details" that give this work its title--as his starting point, N das 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. 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, N das probes the history of his family from the late nineteenth century to his birth in 1942 and beyond. In a work that encompasses World War II and the Hungarian Revolution, N das traces the hidden connections between the seemingly random events of a life and assembles them into a memoir like no other.