Parallel stories I-III.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Parallel Stories, its novelty, which is a surprise even for those familiar with the oeuvre, is the astonishing multitude of essentially independent stories that no realistic construction could possibly bring together in a single narrative. The stories in this novel are almost as countless as we could not count the number of people we have met in our lives, yet they merge into a single narrative. However, the novel's single, great narrative does not tell these stories, but the great story of the interaction of bodies, their attraction to each other, their longing for each other, and their memories of each other. In this sprawling narrative, nodes are created that connect things that happened to different people at the same time and in the same place (the other body in the sensation), at the same time in different places (the other body in the desire), at the same place at different times (the memory of the apartment, the house, the city in the body), or with the same person at different places and times (the own body in the memory). This movement of the narrative from node to node then projects into the reconstructing imagination the web of stories that come together into a reality beyond the text, which is thus practically and theoretically inexhaustible, and therefore capable of creating a world beyond the text created from nothing, yet strictly defined socially and historically, and precisely corresponding to the realities we know or can know. How this is created is the greatest secret of this novel and at the same time its achievement in world literature. Parallel Stories is a work that takes seriously and answers the questions raised by the dissolution of realism, the innovative experiments of the turn of the century, and the nouveau roman, while at the same time restoring the pleasure of reading and standing up to comparison with the greatest works of nineteenth-century grand realism.