- Person
- Imre Kertész
- Lived
- 1929–2016
- Field
- Literature
- From
- Hungarian
The story
Imre Kertész's first novel, Fatelessness (1975), follows György Köves, a Jewish teenager from Budapest, through Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Zeitz. When it appeared it was met with silence. Kertész followed it with two more books that continue the story of the same protagonist as he grows older, and the three are now read as a trilogy about surviving the Holocaust and living with its aftermath.
In Fiasco (1988), Köves has survived the camps and tries to cope with life in post-war Hungary. The novel also reflects Kertész's own experience. As the Swedish Academy described it, an ageing author waits for the expected rejection of his real book, the one about Auschwitz, and meanwhile writes a claustrophobic, Kafka-like novel about socialist Eastern Europe. When he is finally told the earlier book will be published after all, he feels only emptiness.
The trilogy concludes with Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990). Its title refers to the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer recited by mourners in memory of the dead. NobelPrize.org explains that Köves says his Kaddish for the child he refuses to bring into a world that permitted Auschwitz. The book, a long monologue addressed to a friend, also deals with the narrator's failed marriage, his unsuccessful literary career and his Jewishness.
The Swedish Academy observed that the later novels could almost be read as comments and additions to the first and decisive work. Kertész returned to the same circle of characters in Liquidation (2003), set during Hungary's transition from communism to democracy. The trilogy has been widely translated: Fatelessness by Christopher and Katharina Wilson in 1992 and by Tim Wilkinson in 2004, Kaddish into some 16 languages, and Fiasco into English by Wilkinson in 2011.
The Academy compared Kertész's uncompromising style to a dense, thorny hedge, yet noted that he frees his readers from the burden of compulsory emotions and inspires an unusual freedom of thought. Fatelessness went on to become part of many high school curriculums in Hungary, so that the trilogy's story is now familiar to generations of Hungarian students.
Why it matters
Kertész's trilogy gave lasting literary form to the inner lives of survivors and to the moral questions the Holocaust left behind.
About Imre Kertész
Budapest-born survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald whose novel Fatelessness transformed Holocaust literature; in 2002 he became the first Hungarian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
More about Imre Kertész
- Imre Kertész wrote the screenplay for the film FatelessImre Kertész wrote the screenplay for Fateless, the 2005 Hungarian film of his Holocaust novel, directed by Lajos Koltai.
- Imre Kertész's Fatelessness overcame censorship in 1975Imre Kertész's novel Fatelessness, about a Jewish boy in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, was first rejected by Hungary's Communist regime but published in 1975.
- Imre Kertész translated Nietzsche, Freud and WittgensteinImre Kertész supported himself for years as a translator, bringing Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Schnitzler and Canetti into Hungarian.
- Imre Kertész's lectures explored the Holocaust as cultureAfter 1989 Imre Kertész lectured widely, and his talks were collected in books including The Holocaust as Culture (1993) and The Exiled Language (2001).
- Imre Kertész gave voice to witness literatureNobelPrize.org describes Imre Kertész's novels as part of witness literature, in which an author writes about trauma from personal experience.
Sources
- Imre Kertész – Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Fatelessness Wikipedia
- Imre Kertész Wikipedia
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2002 NobelPrize.org
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