Imre Kertesz - Nobel Prize in Literature, 2002 (10 books)

IMRE KERTÉSZ (b. 1929) is a Hungarian author, Holocaust concentration camp survivor, and recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history." His work has established him as one of the most powerful, unsentimental, and imaginatively daring writers of our time.

His best-known work, FATELESSNESS (1975) [also translated as "Fateless">, is a semi-autobiographical novel about a 14-year-old Hungarian Jew's experiences in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. It is the first volume in a trilogy of novels. Available here in two translations.

FIASCO (1988), the second volume in the trilogy, tells an epic story of the author's return from the Nazi death camps, only to find his country taken over by another totalitarian government. Kertész has described it as "fiction founded on reality" -- a Kafka-like account that is surprisingly funny in its unrelentingly pessimistic clarity, of the Communist takeover of his homeland.

The final volume in the trilogy, KADDISH FOR AN UNBORN CHILD (1990), deals with the struggles of a Holocaust survivor after the war, explaining to a friend why he cannot bring a child into a world that could allow such atrocities to happen. The book also deals with the narrator's failed marriage, his unsuccessful literary career, and the concept of his Jewishness. Available here in two translations.

In THE PATHSEEKER (1977), a man undertakes what seems to be a banal trip to a nondescript town that turns into something ominous. Something terrible has happened in the town that no one wants to discuss. 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.

DETECTIVE STORY (1977) 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.

In the haunting novella THE UNION JACK (1991), the narrator recounts a simple anecdote -- his sighting of the Union Jack, the British flag -- during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, in the 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.

DOSSIER K. (2006) is Kertész's response to the hasty biographies and profiles that followed his 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature -- an attempt to set the record straight. The result is an extraordinary self-portrait, in which Kertész interrogates himself about the course of his own remarkable life and continues to delve into the questions that have long occupied him: the legacy of the Holocaust, the distinctions drawn between fiction and reality, and what he calls "that wonderful burden of being responsible for oneself."

Finally, I have included the text of Kertész's Nobel Prize lecture, delivered in December 2002.


The following books are in ePUB format unless otherwise indicated:

* DETECTIVE STORY (Knopf, 2008). Translated by Tom Wilkinson. -- PDF

* DOSSIER K. (Melville House, 2013). Translated by Tom Wilkinson.

* FATELESS (Northwestern UP, 1992). Translated by Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson. -- PDF

* FATELESSNESS (Vintage, 2004). Translated by Tom Wilkinson. [Published in the UK as FATELESS]

* FIASCO (Melville House, 2011). Translated by Tom Wilkinson.

* KADDISH FOR A CHILD NOT BORN (Northwestern UP, 1997). Translated by Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson. -- PDF

* KADDISH FOR AN UNBORN CHILD (Vintage, 2004). Translated by Tom Wilkinson.

* NOBEL PRIZE LECTURE (Nobel Foundation, 2002). Translated by Ivan Sanders. -- PDF

* THE PATHSEEKER (Melville House, 2008). Translated by Tom Wilkinson.

* THE UNION JACK (Melville House, 2013). Translated by Tom Wilkinson.