"No writer in Europe today has dealt more eloquently with the obligations and moral conundrums of memory, private and collective, than the Hungarian novelist and essayist Péter Nádas," Michael Kimmelman writes in Thursday's issue of the New York Times.
He adds that Nádas's A Book of Memories, which Hungarian censors did not allow to be published until 1986, and which was not published in English until 1997, has been compared to the writings of Proust and Thomas Mann. Susan Sontag called the A Book of Memories "the greatest novel written in our time, and one of the great books of the century."
Kimmelman met Nádas in Berlin, where he was also promoting his new book.
"Measured, courtly, with short gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses, in his physical manner remarkably still but with a playful laugh and a dry sense of humor, at 65 he fits the bill of the world-weary Eastern European intellectual," Kimmelman writes, summing up Nádas.
Nádas, who repeatedly refused to cooperate with authorities who wished him to become an informer under communism, made no secret of his distaste for the procedures he was subjected to in order to acquire a visa for his upcoming trip to the U.S., namely being fingerprinted and being made to submit proof of his income.
"If my publisher hadn't dealt with it, I wouldn't go," Nádas said. "You have to protect yourself from terrorism. But I tried to live my life under the Communists without subjecting myself to state violation. I didn't see the world until I was in my 30s because I wouldn't accept the rules of the regime for travel. I would rather have isolation than be told what I can do by the state."
Nádas will speak about Fire and Knowledge, which was published in the U.S. in September, at the Hungarian Cultural Center in New York on November 7 and at the New York Public Library on November 9. He will speak with the writer Susan Rubin Suleiman on the 7th and with library director Paul Holdengräber.
Susan Rubin Suleiman was born in Budapest and emigrated to the U.S. as a child. She has been on the Harvard University faculty since 1981, where she is currently the C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and Professor of Comparative Literature. Suleiman has won many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, and several NEH Fellowships. Her books include Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (1990), and the memoir Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (1996). Her latest book is Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2006).
Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs-now known as "LIVE from the NYPL"-for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.
In Fire and Knowledge, the reader discovers Peter Nádas's major presence as a trenchant commentator on the events that have transformed Hungary and all of Europe since 1989; as a stunning literary critic; as a subtle interpreter of language and politics in societies both free and unfree; and as a moralist with a discerning eye for the crippling effects of deception and hypocrisy. Additionally, Fire and Knowledge acquaints the reader more fully with Nádas's evolution as a writer of fiction, presenting stories from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as from more recent years.
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI) / The New York Times / Hungarian Cultural Center New York
