First published in Hungary in 1986 after a five-year battle with censors, A Book of Memories revolves around several multilayered, elaborately linked narratives. The first, set against the backdrop of 1970s East Berlin, is that of an emotionally tormented young Hungarian writer who is enmeshed in an amorous triad with a German poet and an actress; we also learn of his asolescence in the Stalinist Hungary of the 1950s. The second narrative is a novel the writer is composing about a refined Belle Epoque aesthete, whose antibourgeois transgressions and hypersensitivity mirror his own. The third voice is that of a childhood friend who, after the narrator's death, offers his own perspective on the events that shaped their lives.