March over to Europe to gawk at its churches and what are you told? The tour guides, the tour-guiding priests—they tell you that the greatest cathedrals are left ­unfinished, and do you know why?

P arallel Stories, the colossal new novel by Hungary's Péter Nádas, demands 20th-century attention but offers 21st-century rewards. Commit to immersion and this consummate novel, which leans back to ...

Novelists are always making decisions. They must not only clothe and feed and torture their characters, every element they add to a story - from hairpins to whole family histories - twists upon a ...

In Péter Nádas’s giant novel, there is a paragraph that neatly sums up its sensibility: a young man has just confessed to a murder he may or may not have committed. He is very confused, but in a ...