Péter Nádas - Love

Love opens somewhere in Budapest, Hungary. A couple, not young but close, have had sex and are now lazing about in various states of undress. They are smoking cigarettes, and then some type of drug. The man, clearly an intellectual of some sort, smarter than the girl but enthralled with her sexuality, is intending to leave forever – it's just a matter of saying the word. Or, not, but simply leaving, never to come back. At any rate it's over. He knows it, she doesn't yet.

But surely there's enough time to make love once more, and to have one last drug experience.

That's the premise of Péter Nádas's Love, and it's all much of the plot; he takes care of all this in the first few pages, the narration coming from an intense first-person narration by the man, his intellect swiftly established through the penetration of his analysis concerning the dying embers of their relationship. Sexual attraction remains, but otherwise, there isn't a connection keeping them together, though she thinks there is.

Her voice is but a resounding willingness that clings to my body. As if she herself no longer existed, except for me; for my sake, so that she could manifest herself in me. Her two well-shaped arms cross each other, and with her fingers she smartly grabs the hem of the dress and pulls it upward. The tanned mound of her belly is cut diagonally by the whiter stripe of her scar; the waist grows slimmer in the stretching, and then her white breasts bounce forward, these breasts untouched by sunshine, with their purplish areolae around the nipples. My mouth would like to reach up, but I make no move. It's not the body I need but the movement: the sight, the spectacle, just like this; if I restrain myself, deny myself the sensation of the body, then she is completely mine.

After smoking their drugs, the effects begin to take hold on our narrator. At first, he becomes concerned with the minutiae of the room, its every detail. Then, he does the same with his girlfriend, Éva, and then finally himself. Éva seems unaffected by the drugs (or at least, much less affected than the narrator), but she is unable to provide much solace beyond her presence. The narrator experiences time as though it were extending into forever, but time, “real time” isn't moving at all.

Nádas has written Love in paragraphs, but where one breaks off, on the next line, the other begins at the same place. The effect of this is to make the paragraphs seem to merge into one another, creating a continuous stream of text, incorporating the white space – ordinarily ignored by authors and used wholly for paragraph separation – into the text itself. Single words appear midway through a blank line, and at times, particularly during emotional intense situations, the words cascade across the page.

Due to my execrable HTML skills, instead of attempting to transcribe the text within the review, I have embedded a picture to give an idea of the text:

We learn quickly that the narrator is alarmed by the manner in which the drugs are affecting him. He seems experienced, but he was not expecting this. His perception of things suddenly makes them formless, difficult to attach meaning or significance to. He becomes preoccupied with objects, and sometimes when he thinks he is moving or has done something, he hasn't, and sometimes when he thinks he is standing still, he has done something. He must remember:

Remember! This, too, is only a word that got here from who knows where! Remember! Who is saying this inside me? Remember! Remember what? Remember! Oh! I can't, I cannot remember because I don't know what I'd have to remember. I only know that if, again, I don't know what I should know, that means that, again, once more, I wound up back here, without having found the exit.

But one shouldn't dwell too heavily on the fact that all this is an effect of drug-taking. For Nádas, the drugs get his narrator in the right space, which is to say, it's a vehicle to have his narrator examine in minute detail his physical surroundings, and then his intellectual and emotional self.

Love is a hallucination, an instance stretched to infinity while simultaneously forever repeating. Nádas has created a dream that avoids slipping into nightmare, using as an anchor the feeling of love the narrator feels for Éva. The concrete thoughts, when they emerge from the haze of the narrator's solipsistic musings, revolve around Éva, thoughts often, but not entirely, sexual in nature. Breasts, thighs, skin, belly – these are touchstones for the narrator, and they help keep him connected to reality.

...I can squeeze her body with my arms, my skin can feel her skin, my belly, if I pay attention to it, can feel the curve of her belly; my chest feels her breasts, I can feel her hair; fragrance – and if I can feel all this, then this is the reality I've been struggling for so hard, and all along it has been in my hands.

But when he fails to hold tight to Éva – either physically or mentally – the narrator begins to drown, flailing about within his mind. The matters that preoccupy him in these situations are those of identity and reality, but, inevitably, the primary concern becomes death. And why not? It is, in certain cases, the opposite of love. The narrator obsesses:

...I'm once again inside the repetition of nothing, at a place where Something holds out the hope of letting me catch it but, when I do, reveals its true self to me: as Nothing, which I believe to be Something. And if this Nothing is here, then I'm unable to decide where I am now. It's possible that I'm lying on the bed, but it's just as possible that I am standing over there or am still on the bed or may have jumped out the window and that's why I feel no ground under my feet, nothing, in this darkness. No, that can't be. I'm thinking.

By removing the physical self from consideration, Nádas is able to focus his attention on the internal self, that seeming other who we carry along with as we live out our time. Part of what makes a human being so interesting is its ability to step outside itself and examine its behaviours, decisions and feelings, and make decisions based upon these judgements. In effect, this creates within us a type of dual-self, and it is this duality the narrator explores. He plucks from his mind a thought, holds it up as though it were a piece of art, examines it, checks it for flaws, weaknesses, strengths, and then, if it seems valuable, returns it to himself. Thoughts are weighed and found wanting, or, they are developed in a strange stasis where it is always 12:30am, even though it seems, to the narrator, that endless time has passed.

We can best envisage the progression of the narrator's hallucinations as a kind of bell curve. At either end, lucidity reigns, the language and sentence structure of the text (relatively) ordinary, classically composed and coherent. At the apex, time fractures, freezes, and remains in place for an exhausting number of pages, and it is here that Nádas is at his most experimental. Sentence fragments, looping paragraphs, disjointed sections and endless, endless repetition. The conceit of the hallucinogenic drug makes the balancing act a success, and the conclusions the narrator draws, believable. He isn't quite the man he was at the outset, but the change seems – not for the better, not exactly – but certainly, an increased level of awareness has been attained. The narrator has had the (mis)fortune to peer into a primal aspect of our consciousness, exploring the depths of his self hitherto unplumbed.

Author	Péter Nádas
Title	Love (Original Title: Szerelem)
Translator	Imre Goldstein
Nationality	Hungarian
Publisher	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published	2000 (English) 1979 (French)
Pages	134
Availability: ---Amazon (US)