A Hungarian Scribe’s Antidote to Mental Poison

The keystone to Peter Nadas’s two-volume, 1,000 page-memoir, Shimmering Details—an account of his childhood in postwar Hungary—is nestled at the beginning of the second volume. “I am professionally bound,” Nadas writes, “to confine myself to people with names.” Born in perhaps the darkest year in his country’s history, 1942, during the brutal “Siege of Budapest,” Nadas, one of the greatest living writers, recognizes, on one hand, that there is no escape from or outside of history—its vast horrors and deep ironies—and simultaneously that the imaginative writer has a responsibility to subjectivity: the minute particulars of experience that are too fine-grained for the historian tracking the rise and fall of nations and empires (and too idiosyncratic for a sociologist or philosopher).