End-Point

Neal Ascherson

  • Fateless by Imre Kertész, translated by Tim Wilkinson
    Vintage, 262 pp, £6.99, April 2006, ISBN 0 09 950252 6
  • Liquidation by Imre Kertész, translated by Tim Wilkinson
    Harvill Secker, 144 pp, £12.99, September 2006, ISBN 1 84343 235 8

‘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’.

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