Peter Nadas, a Hungarian author who was best known for A Book of Memories (1986), "a labyrinthine chronicle of life under Communism, and who was often discussed as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature," died on August 26, the New York Times reported. He was 83.
The interweaving stories in A Book of Memories "involve a young writer's struggles in Hungary--including during the quashed 1956 uprising against the Communists--a love triangle in 1970s Berlin, and much more," the Times wrote. When it was first published in English in 1997, the book garnered acclaim for what Eva Hoffman described, in a Times review, as its "probing, digressive, opulently ruminative style," which she compared to Proust's. Susan Sontag called it "the greatest novel written in our time."
Nadas wrote the book over a 12-year period, from 1973 to 1985. His other works include Love (1979), about a man who gets high and starts questioning reality; Parallel Stories (2005), featuring dozens of tales crisscrossing Hungarian history; and Fire and Knowledge (2007), a collection of short stories and essays.
In a 2007 Times profile of Nadas, Michael Kimmelman noted that "no writer in Europe today has dealt more eloquently with the obligations and moral conundrums of memory, private and collective."
Nadas said in 1997 that he knew by the time he became a teenager he wanted to be a writer. After dropping out of high school, he eventually moved to a small village and tried his hand at writing fiction. The Times noted that Nadas "regularly tussled with Hungarian censors. After he submitted his first novel, The End of a Family Story, to them in 1972, it languished for five years before being published. (It came out in English in 1998.) During the 1970s, the secret police met with Mr. Nadas and implied that his troubles would come to an end if he became an informant for them. He declined the deal. Now, he is more celebrated in Hungary." After his death, the country's Prime Minister Peter Magyar was among those posting tributes to Nadas on social media.