In the Age of AI, Remembering What It Means to Be Human Becomes Ever More Urgent

Péter Nádas made memory feel unstable, emotional and crowded with competing voices. The Hungarian novelist, who died on Aug. 26 at 83, devoted his major works to that shifting inner landscape.

Frequently mentioned as a possible Nobel laureate, Nádas developed a demanding literary voice that critics compared with Tolstoy, Proust and Musil, while insisting on his own distinctive perspective. His novels revisited the upheavals of the 20th century through the fleeting perceptions of narrators and characters.

The Book of Memories, published in the late 1980s, became his masterpiece. Parallel Stories followed in the early 2010s. Both works filled history with many voices and resisted the single, totalizing interpretations associated with authoritarian visions of the past.

A year before his death, Nádas published What Shines in the Dark: Memories of a Narrator, an autobiographical work presented as both a historical and intimate panorama. The book offered another display of his exceptional narrative talent.

The column recalls an interview Nádas gave to Isabelle Rüf for Le Temps around that publication. In it, he described how he wove his texts and tried, literally, to capture time through the meshes of his sentences. The reflection gives the headline's appeal to humanity in the age of AI a literary meaning: memory is not a single record, but a texture of voices, feelings and nuances.