Péter Nádas
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- The native form of this personal name is Nádas Péter. This article uses the Western name order.
Péter Nádas (born 14 October 1942) is a Hungarian writer, playwright, essayist.
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[edit] Biography
He was born in Budapest as the son of László Nádas and Klára Tauber. After the takeover of the Hungarian Nazis, the Arrow Cross Party on 15 October 1944, Klára Tauber escaped with her son to Bácska and Újvidék, but returned to the capital directly before the Siege of Budapest. Péter Nádas survived the siege together with his mother in the flat of his uncle, the journalist Pál Aranyossi.
Even though his parents were illegal Communists during World War II and involved with the Communist administration later on, as well, they had both their sons—Péter and Pál—baptized in the Reformed (Calvinist) Church of Pozsonyi Street. His mother died of an illness when he was 13. In 1958, his father—head of department in one of the ministries, slandered with accusations of embezzlement, then exonerated by the court of all charges—committed suicide; Péter Nádas became an orphan at 16. Magda Aranyossi became the guardian of the two children.
Between 1961 and 1963 Péter Nádas studied journalism and photography. He worked as a journalist at a Budapest magazine (Pest Megyei Hírlap) from 1965 to 1969. He also worked as a playwright and a photographer. Since 1969 he has been a freelancer.
In 1990 he married Magda Salamon (with whom he had been living since 1962). In 1984 they moved to a small village in western Hungary, Gombosszeg, where they have resided ever since, though he also has a residence in the Castle District of Buda.
In 1993, he was elected member of the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts.
Since the early 1970s, he has frequently spent time in Berlin, Germany attending lectures at Humboldt University or reading in the Staatsbibliothek. He has been a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Institute for Advanced Study. In 2006, he was elected a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. He enjoys a high reputation in Germany.
[edit] Works
After publishing volumes of short stories, he published his first novel The End of a Family Story in 1977.
He published his second novel, Book of Memories in 1986. It took Nádas eleven years to write this book. The motto of this novel is from the Gospel according to John: "But he spake of the temple of his body" (John, 2.21). In this novel, Nádas describes the world as a system of relations linking human bodies to each other. This book earned Nádas comparisons to Proust.
He published his latest novel, the three-volume Parallel Stories (I: The Mute Realm, II: In the Depths of Night, III: A Breath of Freedom) in 2005. This novel is a multitude of independent stories melt into one single narrative. It took Nádas eighteen years to complete this book. The novel has been described as "a virtuoso combination of nineteenth-century high realism with the experimentalism of the nouveau roman", while "the real narrative is that of bodies' actions on one another, their attraction and desires, their mutual memories" (Gábor Csordás). The plot is constructed around the histories of two families: one—the Lippay-Lehrs, who are Hungarian, the other—the Döhrings, who are German. These two main threads link irregularly up to one another via specific events or figures.
Nádas' other novels include Lovely Tale of Photography, Yearbook, On Heavenly and Earthly Love, and A Dialogue with Richard Swartz. Death is a recurrent theme in Nádas' work, particularly in Own death, based on his experience of clinical death.
His writing has been described as intellectual, detailed, strong, innovative and demanding.
A volume of interviews with Péter Nádas, by Zsófia Mihancsik (Nincs mennyezet, nincs födém) was published in 2006.
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Works in English
- A Lovely Tale of Photography (ISBN 8090217168)
- The End of a Family Story (ISBN 0140291792)
- A Book of Memories (ISBN 0374115435)
- A short story in the anthology Caught in a Story ("A Tale About Fire and Knowledge")
- Love (ISBN 0374529558)
- Own Death (ISBN 3865210104)
- Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays (ISBN 0374299641)
[edit] Awards
He has received numerous awards, including
- the Prize for Hungarian Art, 1989,
- the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (Österreichischer Staatspreis für Europäische Literatur), Austria, 1991,
- Kossuth Prize, Hungary, 1992,
- the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding (Leipziger Buchpreis zur Europäischen Verständigung), Germany, 1995,
- the Vilenica International Prize for Literature, Slovenia, 1998,
- the Prize for the Best Foreign Book (Le Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger), France, 1998,
- the Franz Kafka Prize for Literature, Czech Republic, 2003.
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[edit] External links
- Gábor Csordás: The body of the text. Corporeal writing in Péter Nádas's "Parallel Stories"
- Ottilie Mulzet: A la recherche de corps perdus: Notes from a reading of Péter Nádas's A néma tartomány (The Mute Realm)
- Multilingual Literature Database of the Hungarian Book Foundation
- Péter Nádas: Burial
- Susan Sontag: Nádas's Comedy of Interment
