The Homecoming Of Péter Nádas
My respect for Péter Nádas's new collection, "Fire and Knowledge" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 392 pages, $30), was clinched by an essay called "Homecoming," which describes the three-year mental odyssey that inspired his novel "A Book of Memories" (1998). That novel has been hailed as the masterpiece of contemporary Hungarian literature. In its thoroughness and honesty, the essay rivals the prefaces of Henry James as a document of thoughtful artistic intention.
First, Mr. Nádas talks about his annual autumn sickness, his obsession with death, and his corresponding sentimentality: "In truth I am as sentimental as a piece of bread spread with butter and honey." Dissatisfied with his fiction, which he thought lacked "inner credibility," the author became suspicious of even his own punctuation. Around the age of 30, he developed a loquacious style, in which "the words began to think for me and along with me." His work became musical and lacked solid themes.
Searching for a subject, Mr. Nádas remembered the story of Thomas Mann's homosexual life, which Mann wrote and then destroyed after his marriage. "The literature of the century was full of lacunae of this sort," writes Mr. Nádas. Besides telling Mann's story, Mr. Nádas, free of cultural prohibitions, would tell his own: "What would happen if in the most uncouth and most formless manner I piled high the simple-minded documentation of my life," he wonders. Personal confession would restore "inner credibility."
But confession proved difficult. Mr. Nádas's old sentimentality found its way onto his pages. Finally, after rediscovering the intermediary role of his own imagination, Mr. Nádas emerges:
At long last I succeeded in writing sentences that were stretched out between the rawest forms of selfknowledge and the subtlest forms of imagination, without slipping over to tasteless confession or mere fantasizing. I am extremely proud of this.
He merely discovered balance, you might say. But the breakthrough that here sounds instantaneous occurred over time, and it is to Mr. Nádas's great credit that he can lucidly express the gradual ebbing of confusion in his essay.
Other essays in this collection, especially one that tries to define melancholy, and several essays about the ambivalence of intra-European politics after the Cold War, are original but very hard to follow, in spite of the excellent reading quality of Imre Goldstein's translation. My confidence in Mr. Nádas would be tentative without the fiction included in "Fire and Knowledge."
Most of these stories (which were published under the supposedly soft goulash communism of János Kádar) deal with insolent children. "It was characteristic of [Hungarians]," Mr. Nádas writes in the title essay, "that they came into the world as adults, and since there was nothing to grow up to be, they remained children." But the allegory between Mr. Nádas's stir-crazy children and the citizens of Hungary is secondary to the standalone power of these tales.
In a simple story from 1974, "Liar, Cheater," a young boy fakes his father's signature, claiming that it is his birthday. He spends his day observing some street workers, hypnotized by the pouring of the tar. That night, his teacher calls and presents him with a chocolate bar, for his nonexistent birthday. He panics, running upstairs while his teacher goes in to greet his parents. Into the bathroom, laden with guilt, he throws the chocolate bar behind the bathtub. "The chocolate behind the tub: this made everything worse." Later, he hears the teacher and his parents laughing. No one ever scolds him. His perplexity, on finding that a grave sin could be merely cute, is complicated by our sympathy with his inconstant parents.
"The Lamb," a long story from 1966, examines the deadly side of sociability. A lone Jewish man in a suburban housing development refuses, in his elegance, to gossip, and becomes a pariah. All around him, the neighbors chatter. Having lost faith in themselves, they persecute the Jew, driving him to suicide. Mr. Nádas leads us into one of his typically frank metaphors: The human mind, he regrets, is not an instrument of perception but a sponge "that indiscriminately absorbs any liquid, and then the same liquid, in a slightly altered state, can be squeezed out of it."
This must be the fiction that Mr. Nádas was writing when he lost his sense of "inner credibility," as remembered in "Homecoming." During that crisis, he recalls, "critics, comparing my descriptive talents with those of great writers, showered me with praise." American critics must belatedly join this shower, but also note that besides descriptive talents, Mr. Nádas possesses deep doubts about credibility, doubts that he has expressed with graceful magic.
