Imre Kertész: Fiasco

What is he supposed to do about that? Obviously, he bends down to pick it up, thrusts it into his pocket, and takes it home — it’s his, after all. In his empty hours (and now there are only empty hours in store) he will undoubtedly take it out from time to time. It would be ridiculous, of course, for him to buckle to rolling it uphill, onto the heights of the peaks, but with his senile, cataract-dimmed eyes he contemplates it as if he were still pondering the weight, the grip. He curls his shaking, numb fingers round it, and no doubt he will be clutching it still in the final, the very last moment, when he slumps down, lifeless, from the seat facing the filing cabinet.

IMRE KERTÉSZwas born in Budapest in 1929. At the age of fourteen he was imprisoned at Auschwitz and later at the Buchenwald concentration camps. Upon liberation in 1945 he worked as a journalist before being fired for not adhering to 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 Fiasco and Kaddish for an Unborn Child . Subsequent titles include Liquidation, Union Jack , and The Pathseeker . He 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 WILKINSONis the primary English translator of Imre Kertész (his titles include Liquidation, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, The Pathseeker , and The Union Jack ) as well as numerous other significant works of Hungarian literature. His translation of Kertész’s Fatelessness was awarded the PEN Club Translation Prize.