"The greatest novel written in our time, and one of the great books of the century"aEuro"said Susan Sontag about The Book of Memoirs (1986) by Hungarian novelist P,ter Nadas. Parallel Stories (2005) promises and delivers even more; at the expense, though, of challenging its readers even further. In this article I concentrate on the novel's poetic structure; its representation of the individual versus the communal; and one of its deepest organizing principles, human sensuality. One of the characteristics that sets this novel apart from contemporary literature is Nadas's use of spatiality. What readers of Western narratives are accustomed to is a kind of unity that is anchored in the principle of the causal and the temporal. Both are important for Nadas, too, but they simply structure the novel thematically. On a poetic level, the novel's characteristic features are the parallels it contains, and those "structural principles" through which the ingredients interact. It is the tension resulting from the metonymic interconnectedness of the (parallel) stories in the book that provides the base of its most fundamental structural coherence. The question and the representation of individuality is another key concern of the novel. Nadas represents the significant dates of 1938, 1960-1961, and 1989 as historical watersheds; at the same time he makes us better understand those aspects of life that are less obviously affected by these historical changes, including the question of individuality. What we find as the core of the individual Nadas calls "the human consistency." Its vessel is the individual human body, sensuality, psyche and memories. The individual is pitted against the communal very effectively in the novel. Its tragic worldview, however, is not due to its view or philosophy of history: it results from its anthropology. The body is the epicenter of the novel: it is by means of writing the body, or more precisely the human flesh, that Nadas shows what it means to be a human animal. The shift of focus from body to flesh is one of the senses in which Nadas breaks with the European humanist tradition. What he calls to our attention is that there is not even the slightest chance to completely comprehend what we, as sensual beings, are nonetheless capable of perceiving. He does not answer the question of whether the world and life are knowable or not. What he does do-in an idiosyncratic and innovative way-is to represent both and make us realize that they are perceivable. The result is a very peculiar kind of knowledge: it is both rational and irrational, sensual and intellectual, personal and interpersonal, conscious and unconscious, male and female, mythic and scientific, bodily and spiritual, worldly and unworldly.

Chronic pain could be considered as a neurological disorder. Therefore, appropriate selection of the therapy, which should consider the pathophysiological mechanisms of pain, can result in a successful analgesic outcome. Tapentadol is an analgesic drug which acts both as a mu-opioid receptor (MOR) agonist and as a noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor (NRI), thereby generating a synergistic action in terms of analgesic efficacy, but not for the burden of adverse effects. Therefore, tapentadol can be defined as the first "MOR-NRI" drug. This molecule holds the potential to address at least some of the current limitations of analgesic therapy due to its unique mechanism of action and has shown to be safe and effective in the treatment of chronic pain of cancer and noncancer etiologies including nociceptive, neuropathic and mixed pain. In particular, the MOR component of tapentadol activity predominantly allows for analgesia in nociceptive pain; on the other hand, the NRI component contributes, now in a predominant manner, for analgesic efficacy in cases of neuropathic pain states. This paper will discuss recent pieces of evidence on the pathophysiology of pain, the background on tapentadol and then present some new studies on how the unique mechanism of action of tapentadol provides a key role in its analgesic efficacy in a number of pain states and with a favorable safety profile.