A discussion of three essays by Hungarian essayist/novelist/Nobelist-in-waiting Peter Nadas, dealing with the executions of the Ceaucescu’s, the depths of Hamlet (another killer of tyrants) and the knotty language distortions of Soviet Bloc Hungary, plus some related observations.

I picked up Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays by Peter Nadas based on what short story writer Deborah Eisenberg wrote about it in the New York Review of Books. I’m usually not THAT suggestible, but Eisenberg is obviously passionate about Nadas. Here’s what she said about his novel A Book of Memories in that same review: “After finishing the book, I… felt irreversibly altered, as if the author had adjusted, with a set of tiny wrenches, molecular components of my brain.”

I pictured nanobots, each armed with a multi-tool (including a wrench), scurrying about inside my own skull, opening up some gates to allow more neuronal “flow” and shutting down others. (Until this, I had no idea my mind was like an irrigation project.) Would the sensation be “pleasant”? Or is it simply necessary to experience “what it is to feel or think two mutually exclusive things at once,” which is what Eisenberg says Nadas enables us to do. That doesn’t sound SO impressive, as Eisenberg admits, but frankly we don’t expect it in literature, just our confusing lives, and we certainly don’t expect it to be revelatory in the way Nadas is for Eisenberg.

So, I randomly plucked three essays from the set of 9 short stories and 14 essays and sat down to read. I didn’t hear the clanging of nanobots up there, but I think I understand what Eisenberg has on her mind. Nadas possesses a sharp, insistent intellect that he uses to complicate our thinking, to blur our distinctions, to clog our mental templates. He manages the sweet double of demonstrating the muddiness of our intellectual apparatus in a precise and powerful way: He’s clear about the complexity. More important for my humble purposes, though, these three essays, written in 1977, 1986 and 1998, seemed immediately applicable on all sorts of levels, some of which we’ll get into shortly.
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