Péter Nádas, the Hungarian author known for his surrealist, challenging novels, stories, and plays, died at 83, The New York Times reports.
Nádas was born in Budapest and orphaned at the age of 16 following the death of his mother and suicide of his father. He worked for a Budapest magazine before deciding he wanted to dedicate his career to fiction.
He made his literary debut in 1967 with the novella The Bible; a story collection, The Key-Finding Game, followed two years later. His first full-length novel, The End of a Family Story, was published in 1977.
In 1986, he published what would become his best-known novel, A Book of Memories; the book followed a Hungarian writer living in East Berlin. A critic for Kirkus called the book “one of the major contemporary European novels.” The novel was translated into English by Ivan Sanders and Imre Goldstein, and published in the U.S. in 1997.
Nádas’ other books include Love, Fire and Knowledge, and Parallel Stories, all translated into English by Goldstein, and a two-volume memoir, Shimmering Details, translated by Judith Sollosy.
In The Times of Israel, Sharon Pardo wrote about his experience reading The End of a Family Story, which Pardo finished three days before Nádas’ death.
“I thought I was reading about an unhappy boy in Stalinist Hungary,” Pardo wrote. “I discovered that I was reading about inheritance: a child learning that he belongs to a story he did not choose and barely knew existed. Perhaps that is also what Péter Nádas leaves us. We choose some of our identities. Others are imposed upon us. And some wait quietly inside the stories of our families until, one day, we discover that we have been carrying them all along.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
