Hungarian author Péter Nádas, celebrated for his sprawling explorations of 20th-century history, died on Wednesday at the age of 83, according to publicist Anett Orosz as reported by Euronews. Nádas passed away at his home in Gombosszeg in western Hungary, as confirmed by a post on his Facebook page.
Literary Legacy and Parallel Stories
Nádas spent 18 years writing his colossal, 1,200-page opus, Parallel Stories, which was published in 2005. Set against the backdrop of Hungary’s turbulent 20th-century events, the experimental opus features a multitude of plots and characters. While many lauded the work as a brave and experimental achievement, its profanity and lack of a conventional ending alienated other readers. Nádas once noted that the book’s structure was best described as chaos, stating, “I cannot write any better than this.”
Born into a Jewish family in Budapest in 1942, Nádas survived the brutal siege of the city during the final months of World War II. He lost both parents while still a teenager—his mother died of cancer in 1955, and his father committed suicide in 1958—leaving him to be raised by an aunt. He initially worked as a photographer for a women’s magazine during the 1960s and later transitioned to journalism before committing himself full-time to writing. His literary debut came with the publication of The Bible in 1967.
International Acclaim and Major Works
Throughout the 1970s, Nádas published several additional novels, short stories, and three plays that took aim at Hungary’s then-communist government. His 1986 novel, A Book of Memories, which took more than a decade to write, earned high praise from the late American writer Susan Sontag. Sontag described the book as “the greatest novel written in our time, and one of the great books of the century.” Nádas’s meticulous attention to detail and fluid prose earned comparisons to Marcel Proust.
In 2004, Nádas published Own Death, an account of his near-fatal heart attack during which he was clinically dead before being resuscitated. “I like to live and the body likes to live. But it was good to die as well, it was such a peaceful state, such tranquility, which I had never experienced before,” he told Hungarian public television in a subsequent interview, noting that the experience itself takes place in a “world outside words.”
Awards and Later Years
A fluent German speaker, Nádas earned numerous international accolades over his career, including the Grand Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair, Austria’s European Literature Prize, and the Franz Kafka Prize in 2003. Three years later, he was elected to the Academy of Arts in Berlin. He was also several times tipped to win a Nobel literature prize.
Living a largely reclusive lifestyle with his longtime companion Magda Salamon—whom he married in 1990—Nádas avoided television and radio, though he surfed the internet. In recent years, he remained an outspoken critic of contemporary society and political shifts in his home country, describing Hungary under former premier Viktor Orbán as an “autocracy” in a 2022 interview with the news site 444. Last year, Nádas published a wide-ranging critique of contemporary society and human desire for possession and accumulation.
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