Literature – Peter Esterhazy, Hungary master of irony, is dead – Süddeutsche.de

Direct from the dpa news channel

Budapest (dpa) – The Hungarian writer Peter Esterhazy died at the age of 66 years in Budapest. This was reported by the Hungarian news agency MTI, citing the family and the publisher of the author.

Esterhazy had been suffering from pancreatic cancer for almost a year. Esterhazy used an ironic post-modern style. Most of his novels have been translated into German. In 2004 he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.

Esterhazy was on 14 April 1950 then deep communist Hungary born. As a child he lived with his parents exile in a remote village. The noble Esterhazy were regarded as class enemies. Her ancestors were princes, cultural patrons – Joseph Haydn was resident composer of Esterhazy -, high clergy and politicians. You sat in Esterhazy “Celestial Harmonies” (2001) an ironic monument.

The noble scion studied mathematics, worked as a computer technician in the socialist industry and in 1978 turned exclusively to writing about. With the “production novel” (1979), a sarcastic observation of the reality of work in real socialism, he made the breakthrough. As a result, he developed a very personal style, supported by subtle irony and evocative allusions. His theme was the complex, characterized by fractures history of Central Europe, in the always somehow reflects its own history and that of his family.

With 24 German translations Esterhazy is the hitherto most printed contemporary Hungarian writer in the German language. In addition to the “Celestial Harmonies”, these include among others “Little Hungarian Pornography” (1997), “down the Danube” (1992) and most recently “The cape and sword-version” (2015) and “The Mark-version” (2016) .

last October Esterhazy publicly announced that he was suffering from pancreatic cancer. He underwent chemotherapy and went with his fatal illness outwardly allowed to. Until recently, he appeared in public, as in the previous month on the occasion of the Budapest Book Week, when he gave the opening speech. On Thursday Hungary’s master of irony lost his last fight – the opposite of death, which knows no irony.