Hungarian literature loses one of its most prestigious authors, Péter Nádas, at 83 years old

BarcelonaFor years, and before László Krasznahorkai received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Hungarian author who was rumored to be in the running for the prestigious literary award was Péter Nádas. The writer, playwright, and photographer has died at the age of 83 in Gombosszeg, a municipality in western Hungary, his family has reported. He leaves behind an ambitious, extensive, and prestigious body of work, still unpublished in Catalan, which includes monumental novels such as Book of Memory (1986) — which Susan Sontag considered the "best European novel written after World War II" — and Parallel Stories (2005).

Born in Budapest on October 14, 1942, Péter Nádas had to leave his country with his mother during the persecution of Jews by the Hungarian pro-Nazi regime during World War II. He did not return until the end of the war, and shortly before starting to study Chemistry, he was orphaned. Nádas soon changed his career and graduated in Philosophy, although before dedicating himself to literature, he distinguished himself as a photojournalist for the weekly Pest Megyei Hírlap. Although he debuted with the short story The Bible in 1967, Nádas had problems with censorship due to his first novel, The End of a Saga: finished in 1972, it did not see the light of day until 1977. It told the vicissitudes of a Jewish family during the 1950s, under the communist dictatorship.

The End of a Saga inaugurated the career of a demanding author, with works of remarkable psychological depth, where long sentences and textures close to the experimentalism of the nouveau roman abounded. Novels such as the triptych Parallel Stories, which totals more than 1,500 pages, took him almost three decades of work: "I consider myself a child of the Enlightenment, I don't like to see the world as a chaotic place," admitted the author at the time, who in the book narrated dozens of interwoven stories set during World War II, the communist years, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The growing international prestige of Nádas's work was accompanied by translations into some thirty languages: in Spanish, the novel Libro del recuerdo (Seix Barral, 1998) and the memoir book La propia muerte (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2006), written after surviving a heart attack. The latter arrived four years after the also Hungarian Imre Kertész received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Recently, the small Barcelona-based publisher Temporal reissued La propia muerte and published the essay Melancolía (2023) and the diary Almanaque (2024).