World-famous Hungarian poet: Peter Nadas dies at the age of 83

Death struck him in his home in the southwest Hungarian municipality of Gombosszeg, as an employee of the Budapest publishing house Sarközy es tarsai told the German Press Agency. The publishing house publishes the writer’s literary work. She referred to the family of the deceased.

Nadas’ works “Book of Memory”, “Parallel Stories” and “Luminous Details”, which have also been published in German, are period novels that survey the European 20th century with its horrors and absurdities.

Holocaust survivor

Nadas was born on October 14, 1942 in Budapest. He survived the Holocaust with his family in hiding and with false papers. However, Jewish origins were not an issue in the adolescent’s family. The parents were convinced and then disappointed communists. The mother succumbed to an illness early on when Nadas was 13. Three years later, the father committed suicide.

From 1965 to 1969, Nadas worked for various newspapers and has been a freelance writer ever since. His writing was only hesitantly recognized in communist Hungary. He worked for almost twelve years on the “Book of Remembrance” (German 1991), a 1,300-page opus that helped him achieve his breakthrough in the German-speaking world.

17 years for a masterpiece

Long creative processes characterize many of his major works. Nadas dedicated 17 years to the novel “Parallel Stories” (German 2012). In the 1,700 pages of the German version, he interweaves seemingly incoherent people, motifs and events into a universe beyond the text. Settings and time periods often change abruptly. The author meticulously dissects the mutual impact of human bodies on each other, their mutual desire and the memories and catastrophes of human history stored in them.

The Holocaust and Stalinist terror do not appear directly in it. “Luminous Details” (German 2017), another monumental work of almost 1,300 pages, is again about exactly this time and thus complements the “Parallel Stories”.

Since 1984, Nadas had lived in seclusion in Gombosszeg, a tiny village on the picturesque slopes of the Göcsej hills in southwest Hungary. Together with his wife Magda Salamon, he lived in a traditional farmhouse made of clay and wood.

In recent years he has been considered a promising candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Last year, however, his compatriot Laszlo Krasznahorkai won it.