Novels
- Fateless (1996)
- Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1997)
- Liquidation (2004)
- Detective Story (2008)
- Fiasco (2011)
Novellas
- The Pathseeker (2008)
- The Union Jack (2010)
Non fiction
- The Holocaust as Culture (2012)
- Dossier K (2013)
Novels Book Covers
Novellas Book Covers
Non fiction Book Covers
Imre Kertész Books Overview
Fateless
One of Publishers Weekly’s Fifty Best Books of 1992Fateless is a moving and disturbing novel about a Hungarian Jewish boy’s experiences in German concentration camps and his attempts to reconcile himself to those experiences after the war. Upon his return to his native Budapest still clad in his striped prison clothes, fourteen year old George Koves senses the indifference, even hostility, of people on the street. His former neighbors and friends urge him to put the ordeal out of his mind, while a sympathetic journalist refers to the camps as ‘the lowest circle of hell.’ The boy can relate to neither cliche and is left to ponder the meaning of his experience alone. George’s response to his experience is curiously ambivalent. In the camps he tries to adjust to his ever worsening situation by imputing human motives to his inhumane captors. By imposing his logic that of a bright, sensitive, though in many ways ordinary teenager he maintains a precarious semblance of normalcy. Once freed, he must contend with the ‘banality of evil’ to which he has become accustomed: when asked why he uses words like ‘naturally,’ ‘undeniably,’ and ‘without question’ to describe the most horrendous of experiences, he responds, ‘In the concentration camp it was natural.’ Without emotional or spiritual ties to his Jewish heritage and rejected by his country, he ultimately comes to the conclusion that neither his Hungarianness nor his Jewishness was really at the heart of his fate: rather, there are only ‘given situations, and within these, further givens.’
Kaddish for an Unborn Child
The first word in this mesmerizing novel by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is No. It is how the novel’s narrator, a middle aged Hungarian Jewish writer, answers an acquaintance who asks him if he has a child. It is the answer he gave his wife now ex wife years earlier when she told him that she wanted one. The loss, longing and regret that haunt the years between those two no s give rise to one of the most eloquent meditations ever written on the Holocaust. As Kertesz s narrator addresses the child he couldn t bear to bring into the world he ushers readers into the labyrinth of his consciousness, dramatizing the paradoxes attendant on surviving the catastrophe of Auschwitz. Kaddish for the Unborn Child is a work of staggering power, lit by flashes of perverse wit and fueled by the energy of its wholly original voice. Translated by Tim Wilkinson
Liquidation
A masterly new novel from the 2002 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature: the story of a Hungarian writer whose death forces his circle of friends to confront their own terrible moment in history. Ten years have passed since the fall of Communism. B. a writer of high literary reputation whose birth and survival in Auschwitz defied all probability has taken his own life. Among his papers, his friend Kingbitter discovers a play titled Liquidation in which he reads an eerie foretelling of the personal and political crises that he and B.’s other friends now face: having survived the Holocaust and the years of Communist rule, having experienced the surge of hopefulness that rose from the rubble of the Wall, they are left with little but a sense of chaos and an utter loss of identity. Kingbitter, desperate to understand his friend s suicide, begins a furious search for the novel he believes might be among B. s papers and might provide the key. But the search takes him in unexpected directions: deep into his own memories and into those of B. s ex wife, Judith, the hidden corners of their lives revealed to themselves and to us at the same time as the mystery of B. s life is slowly unraveled. An intricately layered story of history and humanity powerful, disturbing, lyrical, achingly suspenseful, brilliantly told.
Detective Story
As readers, we are accustomed to reading stories of war and injustice from the victims point of view, sympathizing with their plight. In Detective Story, the tables have been turned, leaving us in the mind of a monster, as Nobel Laureate Imre Kert sz plunges us into a story of the worst kind, told by a man living outside morality. Now in prison, Antonio Martens is a torturer for the secret police of a recently defunct dictatorship. He requests and is given writing materials in his cell, and what he has to recount is his involvement in the surveillance, torture, and assassination of Federigo and Enrique Salinas, a prominent father and son whose principled but passive opposition to the regime left them vulnerable to the secret police. Preying on young Enrique’s aimless life, the secret police began to position him as a subversive and then targeted his father. Once this plan was set into motion, any means were justified to reach the regime s chosen end the destruction of an entire liberal class. Inside Martens s mind, we inhabit the rationalizing world of evil and see firsthand the inherent danger of inertia during times of crisis. A slim, explosive novel of justice railroaded by malevolence, Detective Story is a warning cry for our time.
The Pathseeker
‘There’s no such thing as chance…
only injustice.’From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history…
‘ The acclaimed Hungarian Holocaust survivor Imre Kert sz continues his investigation of the malignant methodologies of totalitarianism in a major work of fiction. In a mysterious middle European country, a man identified only as the commissioner undertakes what seems to be a banal trip to a nondescript town with his wife a brief detour on the way to a holiday at the seaside that turns into something ominous. Something terrible has happened in the town, something that no one wants to discuss. With his wife watching on fearfully, he commences a perverse investigation, rudely interrogating the locals, inspecting a local landmark with a frightening intensity, traveling to an outlying factory where he confronts the proprietors…
and slowly revealing a past he’s been trying to suppress. In a limpid translation by Tim Wilkinson, this haunting tale lays bare an emotional and psychological landscape ravaged by totalitarianism in one of Kertsz’s most devastating examinations of the responsibilities of and for the Holocaust. The Contemporary Art of the Novella series is designed to highlight work by major authors from around the world. In most instances, as with Imre Kert sz, it showcases work never before published; in others, books are reprised that should never have gone out of print. It is intended that the series feature many well known authors and some exciting new discoveries. And as with the original series, The Art of the Novella, each book is a beautifully packaged and inexpensive volume meant to celebrate the form and its practitioners.
The Union Jack
A haunting, never before translated, autobiographical novella by the 2002 Nobel Prize winnerAn unnamed narrator recounts a simple anecdote, his sighting of The Union Jack the British Flag during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, in the few days preceding the uprising’s brutal repression by the Soviet army. In the telling, partly a digressive meditation on ‘the absurd order of chance,’ he recalls his youthful self, and the epiphanies of his intellectual and spiritual awakening an awakening to a kind of radical subjectivity. In his Nobel address Kertesz remembered:’I, on a lovely spring day in 1955, suddenly came to the realization that there exists only one reality, and that is me, my own life, this fragile gift bestowed for an uncertain time, which had been seized, expropriated by alien forces, and circumscribed, marked up, branded and which I had to take back from ‘History’, this dreadful Moloch, because it was mine and mine alone…
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