End-Point 
Neal Ascherson
- Fateless by Imre Kertész, translated by Tim Wilkinson Buy this book
- Liquidation by Imre Kertész, translated by Tim Wilkinson Buy this book
‘There is an hour of the day which falls between returning from the factory and the evening Appell, a distinctive, always bustling and liberated hour that I, for my part, always looked forward to and enjoyed the most while in the Lager; as it happened, this was generally also suppertime.’ This is the voice of Gyuri, a 14-year-old boy from a Jewish family in Budapest, remembering life in a German concentration camp in the summer of 1944. It is also the voice of Imre Kertész. His own experiences in the camps gave rise to his masterpiece, a novel whose utter originality sets it apart from all other writing about the Holocaust. Fateless, which won Kertész the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, is not – he has said – an autobiography, but ‘uses the form of an autobiographical novel’.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Neal Ascherson’s books include The Struggles for Poland and Black Sea. He is an honorary lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.
Other articles by this contributor:
Oo, Oo! · Khrushchev the Stalinist
Victory in Defeat · Trotsky
Gazillions · Organised Crime
Lust for Leaks · The Cockburns of Cork
The Media Did It · Neal Ascherson remembers the Wall
On with the Pooling and Merging · The Incomparable Tom Nairn
Even Now · The Silence of Günter Grass
Law v. Order · Putin’s strategy
print layout
tell a friend