San Francisco Frontiers - Reclusive Hungarian author Peter Nadas dies aged 83

"Peter Nadas passed away," publicist Anett Orosz said.

A post on Nadas's Facebook page said the author died early Wednesday at his home in Gombosszeg, western Hungary.

The reclusive, acerbic critic of life under communism -- who was several times tipped to win a Nobel literature prize -- is perhaps best known for "Parallel Stories", a colossal, 1,200-page opus, published in 2005.

It took 18 years to write. With a multitude of plots and characters, the work is set against the backdrop of events in Hungary during the last century.

Many in the country lauded it as a brave and experimental work but its profanity and lack of a conventional ending alienated others.

Nadas once said that the book's structure was best described as "chaos".

"I cannot write any better than this," he added.

In 2004, Nadas published "Own Death", an account of his near-fatal heart attack, in which he was pronounced clinically dead but later resuscitated.

"I like to live and the body likes to live. But it was good to die as well, it was such a peaceful state, such tranquility, which I had never experienced before," he said later in an interview with Hungarian public TV.

The "experience itself takes place in a world outside words", he added, saying that he feared his "translation of the experience would be a distortion".

- 'Greatest novel' -

Born into a Jewish family in Budapest in 1942, Nadas endured the brutal siege of the city at the end of World War II.

He was raised by an aunt after losing both parents while still a teenager: his mother died of cancer in 1955, while his father committed suicide in 1958.

He started out as a photographer at a women's magazine during the 1960s and later became a journalist, before devoting himself full-time to writing. He published "The Bible" in 1967.

Several more novels, short stories and three plays followed in the 1970s that took aim at the then communist government.

A fluent German speaker, Nadas has received numerous awards, including the Grand Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair and Austria's European Literature Prize.

In 2003, he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize and three years later was elected to the Academy of Arts in Berlin.

The late American writer Susan Sontag, one of Nadas's first and most vocal champions, described one of his works, "A Book of Memories", as "the greatest novel written in our time, and one of the great books of the century".

The novel, which Nadas spent more than a decade writing, was first published in 1986 and his attention to detail and fluid prose earned comparisons to French giant Marcel Proust.

"To read (his two best-known works) requires a kind of way of life that is in decline nowadays: to sit down, lie down next to a book, and be in it for a long time," said Sandor Bazsanyi, a Hungarian expert on Nadas.

- 'Live modestly' -

The writer, who married his longtime companion Magda Salamon in 1990, reportedly neither listens to the radio nor watches television -- although he surfs the internet -- and never goes to the theatre.

"I live modestly and have no desire to do otherwise," he has said.

Also a renowned essayist, Nadas last year published a wide-ranging critique of contemporary society, and human desire for possession and accumulation.

"Literature is a personal, not a communal matter, not a national one, but if no one cultivates it, then the population will certainly become stupid," he told Litera, a Hungarian literature site this summer.

He has also criticised former premier nationalist Viktor Orban, describing Hungary under him as an "autocracy" in an interview to news site 444 in 2022.

Orban was prime minister for 16 straight years until his party lost elections this year.

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G.Collins--SFF