Peter Nadas
Hungarian novelist, essayist, and dramatist, a major central European literary figure. Nádas made his international breakthrough with the monumental novel A Book of Memories (1986), a psychological novel following the tradition of Proust, Thomas Mann, and magic realism.
Péter Nádas was born in Budapest, as the son of a high-ranking party functionary. Nádas's grandfather, Moritz Grünfeld, changed his name into Hungarian, which was considered a scandal in the family. Nádas's youth was shadowed by the loss of his parents. Nádas's mother died of cancer when he was young and his father committed suicide. At the age of 16 his uncle gave him a camera, and after dropping out of school Nádas turned to photojournalism. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, he worked as an editor, reader, and drama consultant. After the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Nádas quit his job as a journalist and devoted himself to literature. "I resigned, walked out, and turned my back on the system to save my soul," he later said.
“Hardly anything remained of which he could speak aloud.”
“By fantasizing one builds a more predictable world, and then one has no time to notice what is really happening, because of the din made by one's expectations crashing down.”
“The harmony of two bodies expressed in this single touch, bridging their differences and bending their moral reserve, was as powerful and wild asphysical fulfillment, yet there was nothing false in this harmony, noillusion created that just by touching, our bodies could express feelingsthat rationality prevented us from making permanent; I might even say thatour bodies cooly preserved their good sense, scheming and keeping eachother in check, as if to say, I'll yield unreservedly to the madness ofthe moment but only if and when you do the same; but this physical pleafor passion and reason, spontaneity and calculation, closeness anddistance, took our bodies past the point where, clinging to desire andstriving for the moment of gratification, they would seek a new and more complete harmony.”