Imre Kertész – A Tribute

Imre Kertész is a Hungarian author known for his semi-autobiographical novels. Most of his novels are based on his experience at the Auschwitz and Buchenwald death camps. He is the winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature. The Nobel Committee praised his work for describing the “fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” In his Nobel acceptance speech, he said “ I died once, so I could live”. 

When he won the prize, only two of his novels “Fateless” and “Kaddish for an Unborn Child” were translated into English. He was surprised that he won the award because he was not popular except for a small group of serious readers in Germany, France and Scandinavia. Even after his liberation from the Buchenwald camp in May 1945, he felt stifled by authoritarianism because he returned to a Budapest which was under the Soviet Communists. He lost his job as a journalist because he was not ready to glorify the Soviet leaders and the ‘ism’ that they espoused. He became a translator of German-language authors including Nietzsche, Freud and Wittgenstein. He began focussing on fiction and had a difficult time when he worked as a labourer in the day and wrote fiction at night. To publish his first novel “Fateless” he had to face many challenges because of the repressive Communist regime. It took 13 years for him to complete “Fateless”. 

His second novel “Kaddish for an Unborn Child” is addressed to a child narrator. Imre Kertész refused to father a child because he didn’t want the child to experience a childhood like his, a decision which led to a marital breakup. From 2003, his novels were sold like hot cakes in Hungary – 500,000 copies were sold. Many Hungarians wrote protest letters to the Nobel Committee deriding their decision to award the prize to a Jew. Towards the end of his life Imre Kertész developed Parkinson’s disease and had to move back to Budapest from Berlin for medical care. The interview for the Paris Review was recorded at Berlin. He discussed his initial tryst with writing and how a journal in his childhood helped him to capture everything about the life around him. He says that the reality of the totalitarian systems that he lived in was complex and difficult to convey in words. 

 

References: 

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6235/the-art-of-fiction-no-220-imre-kertesz

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/31/imre-kertesz-obituary

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/01/world/europe/imre-kertesz-dies.html