Henry Kammer Ordine dei libri (cronologico)

Suscitano una sottile inquietudine questi labirintici racconti di Péter Nádas, perché scavano nel profondo delle nostre paure. Soprattutto quella che dovremmo avere di noi stessi, incapaci come siamo di conoscere e rispettare i nostri limiti, e sempre in procinto di cader vittime di un elemento mostruoso che può culminare in follia distruttiva. Nádas esplora con rara penetrazione psicologica quel fragile spazio interiore nel quale conformismo e repressione sociale possono facilmente incidere solchi di violenza e abuso. Lo sperimentano soprattutto i suoi giovani protagonisti, costretti a confrontarsi con l'enigmaticità delle azioni degli adulti, e con una delle tentazioni più radicate nell'animo umano: esercitare voracemente il potere assecondando il minotauro che è in noi.

It is May 1918, and a group of boys are poised on the brink of adulthood. With war sweeping Europe, theirs has become a ghost town: fathers, uncles and older brothers have been called to the front; the trains that arrive through snow-capped mountains bear the living with the dead. As the boys’ graduation looms, so too does their fear of going to fight. Drawn together by the end of all that is familiar, yet repelled by what adulthood has come to represent, a small group of them invent a clandestine world. In their hideaway, with its codes, loves, jealousies, and own elaborate rules, these four test out their frustrations and their fears. Their games are darkly comic, wildly imaginative, increasingly subversive, and they attract the attention of a visitor to the town. By summer’s end, their secret is in ruins. The Rebels is a story of complicity and betrayal, of youthful exuberance and dawning responsibility. Another rediscovered gem from the great Hungarian author of Embers, it is a haunting novel that traces the experience of friends who confuse growing up with dying and adulthood with war, and are jolted forever from the final, irretrievable summer of their adolescence. ‘Elegiac, sombre, musical, and gripping, Embers is a brilliant disquisition on friendship' Observer

Cultuurfilosofisch essay van de Hongaarse schrijver (1929- ) over de zijns inziens zorgelijke toekomst van Europa.

Imre Kertész gehört seit seinem «Roman eines Schicksallosen» zu den großen europäischen Schriftstellern. Ein Mann muß mit dem Fiasko fertig werden, dass sein «Roman eines Schicksallosen» abgelehnt wurde. So erfindet er sich einen Helden, dem er die Bürde seiner eigenen Erfahrungen auflädt.«Ein beklemmendes Werk» (Frankfurter Rundschau)

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. "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 and of his beloved but repudiated father, a state prosecutor who commits suicide after the 1956 uprising. 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 colored lives are integrated in a powerful work of tragic intensity.

Een Hongaarse jongen, wiens vader bij de staatspolitie werkt, wordt aanvankelijk door zijn grootvader opgevoed in de geest van de joodse wijsheid.

In Tuinfeest trekt, tegen het decor van de geschiedenis van Hongarije en de Hongaarse joden, een stoet van levende maar vooral ook dode verwanten en bekenden, tegenstanders en naamloze passanten aan het geestesoog van de ik-figuur voorbij. Tragische gebeurtenissen worden afgewisseld met vrolijkheid en inkeer, humor en geluk. De doortocht van zijn familie door bezetting, deportatie en terreur is gruwelijk en ontroerend. Zijn betrekkingen met vrouwen geven aanleiding tot sterke erotische passages. Temidden van dit feestgedruis van geesten wordt hij geconfronteerd met zijn eigen afstandelijkheid en met de actieve politieke betrokkenheid van zijn alter ego, de hartsvriend uit zijn jeugd die tenslotte naar het Westen emigreert. De ik-figuur heeft zich minder gehecht, maar is wel gebleven.