Vintage International

4 total works

Kaddish for an Unborn Child

by Imre Kertesz

Published 1 August 2004

The first word in this mesmerizing novel by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is “No.” It is how the novel’s narrator, a middle-aged Hungarian-Jewish writer, answers an acquaintance who asks him if he has a child. It is the answer he gave his wife (now ex-wife) years earlier when she told him that she wanted one. The loss, longing and regret that haunt the years between those two “no”s give rise to one of the most eloquent meditations ever written on the Holocaust.

As Kertesz’s narrator addresses the child he couldn’t bear to bring into the world he ushers readers into the labyrinth of his consciousness, dramatizing the paradoxes attendant on surviving the catastrophe of Auschwitz. Kaddish for the Unborn Child is a work of staggering power, lit by flashes of perverse wit and fueled by the energy of its wholly original voice.
Translated by Tim Wilkinson

Fatelessness

by Imre Kertesz

Published 1 August 2004

Fourteen-year-old Gyuri is let off going to school for 'family reasons'. His father has been called up for labour service. Arriving at the family timber store Gyuri witnesses his father sign over the business to the firm's book-keeper with nonchalance and boredom. Two months laters after saying goodbye to his father he finds himself assigned to a 'permanent workplace'. Within a fortnight Gyuri is unexpectedly pulled off the bus and detained without explanation This is the start of his journey to and subsequent imprisonment in Auschwitz. On arrival he finds he is unable to identify with other Jews, and in turn is rejected by them. An outsider among his own people, his estrangement makes him a preternaturally acute observer. Fatelessness' power lies in its refusal to mitigate the unfathomable allenness of the Holocaust, the strangeness is compounded by Georg's dogmatic insistence on making sense of everything he witnesses.

Liquidation

by Imre Kertesz

Published 26 October 2004

Imre Kertész’s savagely lyrical and suspenseful new novel traces the continuing echoes the Holocaust and communism in the consciousness of contemporary Eastern Europe.

Ten years after the fall of communism, a writer named B. commits suicide, devastating his circle and deeply puzzling his friend Kingsbitter. For among B.’s effects, Kingsbitter finds a play that eerily predicts events after his death. Why did B.—who was born at Auschwitz and miraculously survived–take his life? As Kingsbitter searches for the answer—and for the novel he is convinced lies hidden among his friend’s papers—Liquidation becomes an inquest into the deeply compromised inner life of a generation. The result is moving, revelatory and haunting.

Detective Story

by Imre Kertesz

Published 3 January 2008

From Nobel Laureate Imre Kertész comes this riveting novel about a torturer for the secret police of a Latin American regime who tells the haunting story of the father and son he ensnared and destroyed.

Now in prison, Antonio Martens is a torturer for a recently defunct dictatorship. He requests and is given writing materials in his cell, using them to narrate his involvement in the torture and assassination of a wealthy and prominent man and his son whose principled but passive opposition to the regime left them vulnerable to the secret police. Inside Martens's mind, we inhabit the rationalizing world of evil and see firsthand the inherent danger of inertia during times of crisis. A slim, explosive novel of justice railroaded by malevolence, Detective Story is a warning cry for our time.