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| Peter Nadas |
Peter Nadas, Author of ‘the Greatest Novel Written in Our Time,’ Dies at 83
Susan Sontag gave that high praise to “A Book of Memories,” a labyrinthine chronicle of life under Communism.
27 Agust 2026
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 Wednesday at his home in Gombosszeg, Hungary. He was 83.
The death was confirmed by his agent Marc Koralnik, who declined to provide a cause.
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. When it was first published in English in 1997, the book garnered acclaim for what Eva Hoffman described, in a New York 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.”
The journalist Jane Perlez, in a 1997 profile of Mr. Nadas for The Times, connected “A Book of Memories” to “the poetic traditions of Thomas Mann, the sexual explicitness of Jean Genet and the stream-of-consciousness of James Joyce.”
In a 2007 profile of Mr. Nadas for The Times, Michael Kimmelman said that “no writer in Europe today has dealt more eloquently with the obligations and moral conundrums of memory, private and collective.”
Peter Nadas was born in Budapest on Oct. 14, 1942, in the midst of World War II, the elder of two sons of Laszlo Nadas and Klara Tauber, who were both Jewish. As a toddler, Peter endured the Soviet and Romanian siege of the city, which began in late 1944. His mother died when he was 12. His father, who became a high-ranking official in the Communist Party after the war, died by suicide in 1958.
Mr. Nadas said in 1997 that he knew by the time he became a teenager that he wanted to be a writer. After dropping out of high school, he took a photography course and worked for a magazine. But he soon gave up that work to move to a small village and try his hand at fiction.
“I resigned, walked out and turned my back on the system to save my soul,” he later wrote.
Mr. 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. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Peter Magyar was among those posting tributes to Mr. Nadas on social media.
Mr. Nadas is survived by his wife, Magda Salamon, and his brother, Pal.
Some critics called Mr. Nadas’s writing verbose and inscrutable, and pointed out some over-the-top sex scenes. Tibor Fischer, reviewing “Parallel Stories” for The Guardian, said that reading the novel was “like having your face jammed in someone’s crotch.”
But Mr. Nadas said in 1997 that the explicitness in his work was part of the reason for its success — at least in Germany, where he frequently spent time and where he was acclaimed. “German literature is very clever literature,” he said, “but in it, humans don’t exist from the chest down.”
He was often spoken of as a contender for the Nobel Prize, which went to his compatriots Imre Kertesz (in 2002) and Laszlo Krasznahorkai (in 2025). In September 2011, the British gambling company Ladbrokes set Mr. Nadas’s odds of winning at 10 to 1, in third place behind Adonis, the Syrian-Lebanese poet, and Tomas Transtromer, the Swedish poet — and eventual laureate.
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