Peter Nadas, Author of ‘the Greatest Novel Written in Our Time,’ Dies at 83

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.

Alex Marshal
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.

Lives Crisscross Through Tumult in Hungary / Stories by Peter Nadas

Lives Crisscross Through Tumult in Hungary

By Adam Langer
Dec. 4, 2011

The physical copy of Peter Nadas’s “Parallel Stories” does not hold up well to a particularly aggressive reading. In at least one reader’s experience, cracking the book’s spine to make the 1,133-page tome into a more manageable bedtime read caused pages to break loose from their binding; by novel’s end piles of disordered pages were scattered every which way. 

Péter Nádas by Davis Kovacs

Péter Nádas
Photo by Miriam Berkley.

Interview

Péter Nádas 

by Davis Kovacs

JULY 1, 2007

Péter Nádas is Hungary’s leading contemporary writer. A scholar not only of literature, but of culture, horticulture, and above all the human body and its communications, Nádas presents a picture of temperament and elegance in the great tradition of the European intellectual. He has often been compared, perhaps syntactically, to the high realists Robert Musil and Marcel Proust. Susan Sontag, one of Nádas’s earliest and most vocal champions, compares his plays to the “encounter-dramas of Pina Bausch” and the “declamatory plays of Thomas Bernhard.” I myself see him, in many ways, as the Thomas Mann of our times.