Imre Kertesz

‘A sophisticated and brilliant dissection of nihilistic power’ Times Literary Supplement From his prison cell, Antonio Martens, an interrogator for the recently fallen dictatorship, awaits execution. His charge? Multiple counts of murder; the murder of those disappeared by the state. Bereft of authority, and unable to avoid the consequences of his actions any longer, Martens turns his story to his involvement in the assassination of the high-profile Salinas family, and with it peers into the murderous mechanics of a regime bent on achieving its ends - no matter the means.

Detective Story

Translated into English at last, Fiasco joins its companion volumes Fatelessness and Kaddish for an Unborn Child in telling an epic story of the author's return from the Nazi death camps, only to find his country taken over by another totalitarian government. Fiasco as Imre Kertesz himself has said, "is fiction founded on reality"—a Kafka-like account that is surprisingly funny in its unrelentingly pessimistic clarity, of the Communist takeover of his homeland. Forced into the army and assigned to escort military prisoners, the protagonist decides to feign insanity to be released from duty. But meanwhile, life under the new regime is portrayed almost as an uninterrupted continuation of life in the Nazi concentration camps-which, in turn, is depicted as a continuation of the patriarchal dictatorship of joyless childhood. It is, in short, a searing extension of Kertesz' fundamental theme: the totalitarian experience seen as trauma not only for an individual but for the whole civilization—ours—that made Auschwitz possible. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Fiasco

In deze indringende maar vlot geschreven roman toont Nobelprijswinnaar Imre Kertész van binnenuit hoe een gewone man besluit mee te werken aan de marteling en moord van onschuldige mensen. Voor het eerst in zijn oeuvre verplaatst Kertész zich in de rol van de dader. Na de val van een obscure dictatuur in Latijns-Amerika moet geheim agent Antonio Rojaz Martens zich voor een volksgericht verdedigen. Terwijl hij in gevangenschap zijn terdoodveroordeling afwacht, legt hij op papier rekenschap af van zijn daden. Martens wordt zijn rol in de zaak Salinas ten laste gelegd: het tragische geval van een vader en zijn zoon, die door een samenzwering binnen het staatsapparaat valselijk zijn beschuldigd, gemarteld en vermoord. Zelf vindt Martens dat hij niets verkeerd heeft gedaan. Hij heeft wel momenten van twijfel gekend, maar dat maakt hem des te menselijker. Met zijn scherpzinnige en analytische blik legt Imre Kertész de absurde logica van een totalitair systeem bloot, waarin angst en schuld regeren en er geen plaats is voor onschuld. Een indrukwekkend verhaal, geschreven met de scherpzinnige blik die al het werk van Kertész kenmerkt, maar ook met een zekere, wrange, humor. Dit verhaal over schuld en onschuld, daders, slachtoffers en meelopers heeft een universele zeggingskracht. De samenzwering verschijnt nu voor het eerst in Nederlandse vertaling.

Samenzwering

'While the average reader cannot pretend truly to understand the reality of those who suffered in concentration camps, Kertesz draws us one step closer' Observer Gyuri, a fourteen-year-old Hungarian Jew, gets the day off school to witness his father signing over the family timber business - his final act before being sent to a labour camp. Two months later, Gyuri finds himself assigned to a 'permanent workplace'. This is the start of his journey to Auschwitz. On his arrival Gyuri finds that he is unable to identify with other Jews, and is rejected by them. An outsider among his own people, his estrangement makes him a preternaturally acute observer, dogmatically insisting on making sense of the barbarity - and beauty - he witnesses.

Fateless

‘A fine and powerful piece of work... Dark, at times cryptic, and hugely energetic’ Irish Times “No!" is the first word of this haunting novel. It is how a middle-aged Hungarian-Jewish writer answers an acquaintance who asks him if he has a child, and it is how he answered his wife years earlier when she told him that she wanted one. The loss, longing and regret that haunt the years between these two 'No!'s give rise to one of the most eloquent meditations ever written on the Holocaust. As Kertész's narrator addresses the child he couldn't bear to bring into the world, he takes readers on a mesmerising, lyrical journey through his life, from his childhood to Auschwitz to his failed marriage.

Kaddish For An Unborn Child

"It was...unnecessary for me to fret about who the murderer was: Everybody was." A haunting, never-before-translated, autobiographical novella by the 2002 Nobel Prize winner. An 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..." 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 Kertész, 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.

Imre Kertesz

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