Hello Gentle Reader,
The
term Proustian is at times, bandied about careless regarding, cheapening the
term into some literary cliché. Quite like Marcel Proust, many writers have
engaged with the individual’s relationship and experience of memory, albeit in
very different ways. Patrick Modiano rejected Proust’s gilded perspective of
memory and all of its sensuality. The cascading chorus of stimuli welling up
from the back of the mind, infusing one with the bittersweet taste of temporal displacement
and the ethereal tug and twinge of time lost. Instead Modiano viewed memory as
a dishevelled archive. Unorganized and incomplete. Any to all information is fragmentary
and questionable. Memory was the bits of flotsam left behind in the ocean of
oblivion. The driftwood desperate characters cling to, holding on to themselves
and seeking understand their identity and their own history. In the case of
Annie Ernaux, memory is a recorded fact. Observed states, experiences, thoughts
and emotions, captured in a staccato language flensing away the voluptuousness
volume of Proust’s exceptionally pregnant sentences. Ernaux eschews all ornamentation
and decoration for staccato directness. Nádas Péter, however, now there was a
writer who didn’t rival Marcel Proust, but was perhaps able to match the classic
French modernist in style and preoccupation of memory, human relationships and
the individual’s relationship to history; specifically, the abject indifference
history pays to the individual, caught up in its currents and riptides, whereby
they are left to drown and be dejected. Rather like Proust, Nádas employed long
labyrinthine sentences which snaked and swirled across the pages and through
chapters, crossing and crisscrossing; circling their points with a vulture’s
leisure. In literary world which has since turned towards the values of simplicity
through subtraction to obtain universality and approachability; Nádas Péter was
unapologetically maximalist in his rumination prose, which embraced an almost
photorealistic attention to detail, capturing the sensory reality of consciousness
and there rippling sensations in the physical realm of the body. Nádas, however,
maintained a unflinching and honest obsession in detailing the corruption, trauma
and unescapable horrors which made up the mid-century Eastern European history.
Countries devasted by war; scared and ravaged by the receding wave of fascism
and Nazism; then the slow oxidising corrosion of the Soviet communist regime, wearing
everything down with its relentless ugliness, its monolithic brutalism. Nádas Péter,
a trained photojournalist, never looked away from these horrors, but instead remained
firm in documenting and depicting it with unflinching realism. Nádas was born
into a world on fire: specifically, the year 1942, in Budapest during the siege
of the city during the Second World War. Tragedy quickly followed, his mother
died of cancer while Nádas was a teenager. Three years after his mother’s death
Nádas father would commit suicide, leaving the orphaned writer to be raised by
an aunt. What followed are the mere scant details of biography, first the foray
of photography then the turn to journalism, before embracing his life as a
writer, one who heavily criticised the communist regime. “A Book of Memories,” “Parrell
Stories,” and “Shimmering Memories Vol I & Vol II,” remain Nádas Péter most
recongisable texts. Though “Parrell Stories,” gets special mention for the uncompromising
size and volume of text, in a style that the writer himself described as ‘chaos’;
while Susan Sontag championed and praised “A Book of Memories.” All of Nádas
work remains a testament to literary complexity, not as an idea, but as the
necessary means in which to capture the incomprehensible reality of consciousness,
memory and living. As a writer, and one of global critical renowned, Nádas Péter
was often tipped as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, having been
recongised as a giant of Hungarian literature for years now, along with his
counterpart and last years laureate Krasznahorkai László.
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
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