Péter Nádas

The agendas of three European men with dubious political histories converge in the aftermath of an 1989 death linked to the fates of myriad Hungarians, Jews, Germans and Gypsies across the treacherous years of the mid-20th century. By the author of The End of a Family Story.

A Novel

Parallel Stories

öykü

Ölümle başbaşa

A psychological novel about the memory of things in Europe's recent past interweaves the first-person narratives of a young Hungarian writer, his literary creation--an egomaniacal Marxist and aesthete--and his childhood friend. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

A Book of Memories

The magnum opus of one of Europe's greatest living writers. “Instead of a chronicle, a person tends to manufacture legends when he relates the story of his life for others,” Péter Nádas writes in his fiction masterpiece, Parallel Stories. Now, in his illuminating memoir, Shimmering Details, the renowned author investigates what it means to reconstruct a life without recourse to the techniques and embellishments of traditional storytelling. Taking his firmly imbedded memories—the “shimmering details” that give this work its title—as his starting point, Nádas dissects them using a method inspired by Freudian dream interpretation. Sounds, scenes, smells, feelings—all are probed for details that might allow him to reconstruct what happened, and when and where. In order to avoid conscious or unconscious distortions, he deconstructs the stories of others, too—moving in concentric circles toward cause and effect, until their meaning and significance come to light. In Shimmering Details, Volume I, Nádas probes the history of his family from the late 19th century to his birth in 1942 and beyond. In a work that encompasses World War II and the Hungarian Revolution, Nádas traces the hidden connections between the seemingly random events of a life and assembles them into a memoir like no other.

A Memoir

Shimmering Details, Volume I

Собствена смърт

emléklapok egy elbeszélő életéből

Világló részletek

Párhuzamos történetek

This extraordinary magnum opus seems at first to be a confessional autobiographical novel in the grand manner, claiming and extending the lagacy of Proust and Mann. A BOOK OF MEMORIES is made up of three first-person narratives: the first that of a young Hungarian writer and his fated love for a German poet; we also learn of the narrator's adolescence in Budapest, when he experiences the downfall of his once upper-class but now pro-Communist family. A second memoir, alternating with the first, is a novel the narrator is composing about a refined Belle Epoque aesthete, whose anti-bourgeois transgressions seem like emotionally overcharged versions of the narrator's own experiences. A third voice is that of a childhood friend who, after the narrator's return to his homeland, offers an apparently more objective account of their friendship. Together these brilliantly coloured lives are inte-grated in a powerful work of tragic intensity.

A trajetória de um livro encadernado em couro preto nos leva do cerco soviético que libertaria Budapeste da ocupação nazista à condição miserável em que vivem os desfavorecidos no regime socialista. Sempre na iminência de um acontecimento surpreendente, acompanhamos, nesta extraordinária novela, um adolescente que descobre o poder da sexualidade nascente e a sua inesperada capacidade de ser violento e cruel.

A Bíblia

1950s Hungary, a country under Stalinist repression, an old man flees with his memories of the past, in which he believes he can still find redemption, taking his grandson, Simon, with him. For him, he invents a fantastic tapestry of stories, a family saga. His mother dead and his father condemned by the authorities as a traitor, Simon is sent to an institution where the inmates are sentenced to silence. Liberated by his grandfather's stories, Simon gives dark and passionate testimony to the alienation and treason that surrounds him.

The End of a Family Story

Peter Nadas, born in 1942 in Budapest, is the author of A BOOK OF MEMORIES and THE END OF A FAMILY STORY, which have won him wide acclaim as the outstanding Hungarian writer of his time. A LOVELY TALE OF PHOTOGRAPHY is an hallucinatory novella about a female photographer who is suffering from an undetermined illness. Confined to a sanitorium, where she is surrounded by a cast of stock characters speaking various languages, she is made to confront a reality other than that framed by her camera.

A Film Novella

A Lovely Tale of Photography

The magnum opus of one of Europe's greatest living writers. In Shimmering Details, Volume II, Péter Nádas delves deeper into his and his parents’ lives during the tumultuous years spanning the rise of Hungarian communism in 1948 to the brutal suppression of the 1956 uprising. Zeroing in on this critical period—which overlapped with the formative years of his childhood—Nádas concludes his monumental history of a family whose own experiences and fortunes are deeply intertwined with two centuries of Hungarian history. This second volume is a composite portrait of life lived at the nexus of world-historical forces—a jewel-like study that holds up different facets of the human experience to the light of Nádas’s singular prose style. What emerges is a memoir of unusual insight and exceptional power. Hailed by Deborah Eisenberg as an “extraordinary writer,” Nádas has confirmed his place among Europe’s greatest living authors.

Shimmering Details, Volume II

This extraordinary magnum opus seems at first to be a confessional autobiographical novel in the grand manner, claiming and extending the legacy of Proust and Mann. But it is more: Peter Nadas has given us a superb contemporary psychological novel that comes to terms with the ghosts, corpses, and repressed nightmares of Europe's recent past.

Minnesanteckningarnas bok publicerades första gången 1986, efter fem års kamp mot censur i Ungern. Berättelsen, som är skriven i jag-form, utgörs av tre delar och är både en bekännelse av författarens liv, och ett sökande in i de förtrycka upplevelser som är Europas historia.

Minnesanteckningarnas bok

Az égi és a földi szerelemről

I looked into its filmy eyes inquisitively and saw it was the bodys fear, not mine, not the souls, and so it was fear of death. I realised I could distinguish between my inner self and my physical body... An ice-cold surface covered my inner heat. Péter Nádas In this short story a man relates his innermost thoughts as he suffers a heart attack on the street and is then brought back to life after three and a half minutes. It is a compelling tale of something appalling and completely ordinary, of pain and fear and acceptance, while walking the thin line between life and death. In contrast to the speed of this near-death experience, Own Death includes a series of photos in which the passage of time is hardly apparent. Over the course of a year the author photographed a wild pear tree in his garden at different times of the day, recording its changes under a range of light conditions. Own Death contrasts perceptions of the here and now with the hereafter, and its complex composition alludes to the passage of mortal time. Péter Nádas, born in Budapest, Hungary in 1942, worked as a press photographer before becoming a writer. His first book of stories was published in 1967 and his bestselling novel, A Book of Memories, was published in 1986. Nádas is among the most important authors of our time and has received numerous prizes including the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding, and the Kossuth Prize. Steidl published Nádas Etwas Licht in 1991.

Own Death

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 In 1989, the year the Wall came down, a university student in Berlin on his morning run finds a corpse on a park bench and alerts the authorities. This scene opens a novel of extraordinary scope and depth, a masterwork that traces the fate of myriad Europeans—Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Gypsies—across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century. Three unusual men are at the heart of Parallel Stories: Hans von Wolkenstein, whose German mother is linked to secrets of fascist-Nazi collaboration during the 1940s; Ágost Lippay Lehr, whose influential father has served Hungary's different political regimes for decades; and András Rott, who has his own dark record of mysterious activities abroad. The web of extended and interconnected dramas reaches from 1989 back to the spring of 1939, when Europe trembled on the edge of war, and extends to the bestial times of 1944–45, when Budapest was besieged, the Final Solution devastated Hungary's Jews, and the war came to an end, and on to the cataclysmic Hungarian Revolution of October 1956. We follow these men from Berlin and Moscow to Switzerland and Holland, from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, and of course, from village to city in Hungary. The social and political circumstances of their lives may vary greatly, their sexual and spiritual longings may seem to each of them entirely unique, yet Péter Nádas's magnificent tapestry unveils uncanny reverberating parallels that link them across time and space.This is Péter Nádas's masterpiece—eighteen years in the writing, a sensation in Hungary even before it was published, and almost four years in the translating. Parallel Stories is the first foreign translation of this daring, demanding, and momentous novel, and it confirms for an even larger audience what Hungary already knows: that it is the author's greatest work.

A new novel by the acclaimed Hungarian writer explores life of a relationship, lingering in a languid moment between a woman and the man who intends to end their relationship. 15,000 first printing.

Love

För den tioårige Péter Simon är farfaderns judiska myter en lika påtaglig del av nuet som den hemlighetsfulla trädgården utanför huset. Faderns förvandling från huvudvittne till anklagad i en politisk rättegång har samma självklarhet som hans egen vistelse vid en omskolningscentral för barn till de ungerska förräderiprocessernas dömda. Sinnesintryck, minnesekon och tidsplan glider ihop och tätnar. Slutet på en familjeroman är en barndomsskildring med sällsam lyskraft där gränsen mellan nu och förflutet löses upp i en total närvarokänsla. Péter Nádas föddes 1942 i Budapest. Slutet på en familjeroman från 1977 blev hans genombrott, vilket befästes internationellt med Minnesanteckningarnas bok 1986. Hans senaste bok i svensk översättning var trebandsromanen Parallella historier (Albert Bonniers Förlag).

Péter Nádas

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