Péter Nádas, chronicler of memory's many voices, dies at 83

Péter Nádas died on 26 August at the age of 83, Le Temps reports. The Hungarian writer had been mentioned repeatedly as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and critics compared his work to that of Tolstoy, Proust and Musil — though, the Swiss paper notes, he kept a voice entirely his own.

Memory was the true subject of his novels: not memory as a fixed record but as something diffracted, shifting, emotional and prone to forgetting. Through that lens he replayed the convulsions of the twentieth century as felt by his narrators and characters, offering, according to Le Temps, a kind of answer to totalitarian, single-voiced visions of history.

His masterwork, Le Livre des mémoires, appeared at the end of the 1980s. Histoires parallèles followed in the early 2010s, both resonating, per the paper, with a multiplicity of voices. A year ago almost to the day, his last book appeared in French translation: Ce qui luit dans les ténèbres. Souvenirs de la vie d'un narrateur, published by Noir sur Blanc, an autobiographical narrative built as both a historical and an intimate fresco.

Le Temps points readers back to the interview Nádas gave Isabelle Rüf for the paper on the occasion of that book's publication, in which he described how he wove the fabric of his texts — how, he said, he tried to capture time itself through the mesh of his sentences.