Fiasco [Paperback]

Imre Kertesz (Author), Tim Wilkinson (Translator)

Book Description

Release date: March 22, 2011

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Heroic....Kertész is unique in Holocaust literature....[H]e seems to flaunt the thoughts and feelings that contradict the accepted narrative."
—Nan Goldberg, The Boston Globe

"[A] powerful book.... If Fatelessness was written with a bright mock-naivety that led to comparisons with Candide, and Kaddish employed the harsh comic rant of Thomas Bernhard, then the presiding ghosts of Fiasco are clearly Beckett and Kafka, those 20th-century masters of confusion and despair."
—Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine

"[O]ne of the best renderings of what it must have been like to survive a Nazi murder camp."
—The Los Angeles Times

"Fiasco plays with the art of bearing witness with great risk and proclaims the magnitude of what's becoming an endangered species, the individual, whose death in this century has been repeatedly proclaimed, celebrated and here, denied."
--Hans-Harald Muller, Die Welt (Germany)

"We knew Imre Kertesz capable of dry wit  in the most horrific moments, but his representation of the socialist world reveals a great sense of humor that we did not know about...here we all laugh. And we laugh intelligently."
--L'Express (France)

"An unforgettable novel...a project with strong Kafkaesque and Camus-charged themes."
--Reinhard Baumgart, Die Zeit (Germany)

About the Author

Imre Kertesz was born in Hungary in 1929. At the age of fourteen he was imprisoned at Auschwitz and later at Buchenwald concentration camps. He is the author of 14 books of fiction and non-fiction, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002 for "writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history." He lives in Berlin.

Tim Wilkinson is the primary English translator of Imre Kertesz. His translations include Kaddish for an Unborn Child, Liquidation, The Pathseeker and The Union Jack as well as numerous other significant works of Hungarian history and literature. His translations of Kertesz's Fatelessness was awarded the PEN Club Translation Prize. He lives in London.

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Melville House (March 22, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1935554298
• ISBN-13: 978-1935554295
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #434,665 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

IMRE KERTÉSZ was born in Budapest in 1929. At age fifteen he was deported to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, and finally to a subcamp at Zeitz, to labor in a factory where Nazi scientists were trying to convert coal into motor fuel. Upon liberation in 1945 he worked as a journalist before being fired for not adhering to the Communist party doctrine. After a brief service in the Hungarian Army, he devoted himself to writing, although as a dissident he was forced to live under Spartan circumstances. Nonetheless he stayed in Hungary after the failed 1956 uprising, continuing to write plays and fiction in near-anonymity and supporting himself by translating from the German writers such as Joseph Roth, Freud, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. He remained little-known until 1975, when he published his first book, Fatelesseness, a novel about a teenage boy sent to a concentration camp. It became the first book of a trilogy that eventually included The Failure and Kaddish for an Unborn Child. Subsequent titles include Liquidation, The Pathseeker, Union Jack, and, a memoir, The File on K. In 2002, Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Budapest and Berlin.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Kafka, after Auschwitz May 10, 2011

By DA

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Imre Kertész won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002. His most famous novel, Fatelessness, has quietly sold many copies, and he is, for a growing community of readers, the most powerful European writer still living.

Despite this, much of his writing remains unpublished in English. Brooklyn based indie press Melville House began to correct this with the publication of several novellas, most notably The Union Jack in 2010. Last month, Melville House published his novel Fiasco, completing the conceptual trilogy begun with Fatelessness and Kaddish for an Unborn Child.

When asked to describe Kertész's writing, I usually say he is like Kafka, after Auschwitz. This is an indecent description (though Fiasco is the most Kafkaesque of all his novels), but it is the closet I can come to capturing the darkness and humor and irony of Kertész. Fiasco is a terrifying and occasionally hilarious look at life in Soviet Hungary, told first by an anonymous author (ostensibly Kertész himself) and later by Koves, the protagonist of the anonymous author's novel. Looming over every paragraph is the question of how lived experience of totalitarianism relates to writing about totalitarianism and the imperative of the writer to write, even in the face of extreme or changing conditions.

Fiasco is as powerful as Fatelessness and deserves to be read just as widely.