Hatchet Job of the Day
Tibor Fischer’s review of PARALLEL STORIES (review roundup here) by Peter Nádas in The Guardian was gleefully savage. Fischer thought Nádas’s nomination for The Literary Review‘s Bad Sex Award well-deserved:
Hungary’s literature had a puritanical 1950s, a sober 1960s, and they largely missed out on all the Henry Miller, Lady Chatterley, Jean Genet,William Burroughs jazz. It’s almost as if Nádas is trying to catch up in one bound. Every time a new male character appears you fear he’s going to be wanking or investigating his foreskin in a line or two (and he will be). The only relief from cocks is the occasional intervention of some labia or a clitoris. Doubtless, Nádas has some artful justification for this, but it’s like having your face jammed in someone’s crotch – it gets exasperating very quickly, and there’s still 900 pages to go.
Read all the reviews.
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