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Fiasco

Author Imre Kertész
Translated by Tim Wilkinson
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Paperback
$18.95 US
| $21.50 CAN
Melville House
On sale Mar 22, 2011 | 368 Pages | 9781935554295
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Translated into English at last, Fiasco joins its companion volumes Fatelessness and Kaddish for an Unborn Child in telling an epic story of the author's return from the Nazi death camps, only to find his country taken over by another totalitarian government.

Fiasco as Imre Kertesz himself has said, "is fiction founded on reality"—a Kafka-like account that is surprisingly funny in its unrelentingly pessimistic clarity, of the Communist takeover of his homeland. Forced into the army and assigned to escort military prisoners, the protagonist decides to feign insanity to be released from duty. But meanwhile, life under the new regime is portrayed almost as an uninterrupted continuation of life in the Nazi concentration camps-which, in turn, is depicted as a continuation of the patriarchal dictatorship of joyless childhood. It is, in short, a searing extension of Kertesz' fundamental theme: the totalitarian experience seen as trauma not only for an individual but for the whole civilization—ours—that made Auschwitz possible.

"Heroic....Kertész is unique in Holocaust literature....[H]e seems to flaunt the thoughts and feelings that contradict the accepted narrative."
—Nan Goldberg, The Boston Globe

"[A] powerful book.... If Fatelessness was written with a bright mock-naivety that led to comparisons with Candide, and Kaddish employed the harsh comic rant of Thomas Bernhard, then the presiding ghosts of Fiasco are clearly Beckett and Kafka, those 20th-century masters of confusion and despair."
—Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine

"[O]ne of the best renderings of what it must have been like to survive a Nazi murder camp."
—The Los Angeles Times

"Fiasco plays with the art of bearing witness with great risk and proclaims the magnitude of what's becoming an endangered species, the individual, whose death in this century has been repeatedly proclaimed, celebrated and here, denied."
--Hans-Harald Muller, Die Welt (Germany)

"We knew Imre Kertesz capable of dry wit  in the most horrific moments, but his representation of the socialist world reveals a great sense of humor that we did not know about...here we all laugh. And we laugh intelligently."
--L'Express (France)

"An unforgettable novel...a project with strong Kafkaesque and Camus-charged themes."
--Reinhard Baumgart, Die Zeit (Germany)
© Imre Kertész
Imre Kertesz was born in Budapest in 1929. At age 15 he was deported to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, and finally to a subcamp at Zeitz, to labor in a factory where Nazi scientists were trying to convert coal into motor fuel. Upon liberation in 1945 he worked as a journalist before being fired for not adhering to the 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 The Failure and Kaddish for an Unborn Child. Subsequent titles include Liquidation, Union Jack, and, most recently, a memoir, The File on K. In 2002, Kertesz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Budapest and Berlin. View titles by Imre Kertész

About

Translated into English at last, Fiasco joins its companion volumes Fatelessness and Kaddish for an Unborn Child in telling an epic story of the author's return from the Nazi death camps, only to find his country taken over by another totalitarian government.

Fiasco as Imre Kertesz himself has said, "is fiction founded on reality"—a Kafka-like account that is surprisingly funny in its unrelentingly pessimistic clarity, of the Communist takeover of his homeland. Forced into the army and assigned to escort military prisoners, the protagonist decides to feign insanity to be released from duty. But meanwhile, life under the new regime is portrayed almost as an uninterrupted continuation of life in the Nazi concentration camps-which, in turn, is depicted as a continuation of the patriarchal dictatorship of joyless childhood. It is, in short, a searing extension of Kertesz' fundamental theme: the totalitarian experience seen as trauma not only for an individual but for the whole civilization—ours—that made Auschwitz possible.

Reviews

"Heroic....Kertész is unique in Holocaust literature....[H]e seems to flaunt the thoughts and feelings that contradict the accepted narrative."
—Nan Goldberg, The Boston Globe

"[A] powerful book.... If Fatelessness was written with a bright mock-naivety that led to comparisons with Candide, and Kaddish employed the harsh comic rant of Thomas Bernhard, then the presiding ghosts of Fiasco are clearly Beckett and Kafka, those 20th-century masters of confusion and despair."
—Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine

"[O]ne of the best renderings of what it must have been like to survive a Nazi murder camp."
—The Los Angeles Times

"Fiasco plays with the art of bearing witness with great risk and proclaims the magnitude of what's becoming an endangered species, the individual, whose death in this century has been repeatedly proclaimed, celebrated and here, denied."
--Hans-Harald Muller, Die Welt (Germany)

"We knew Imre Kertesz capable of dry wit  in the most horrific moments, but his representation of the socialist world reveals a great sense of humor that we did not know about...here we all laugh. And we laugh intelligently."
--L'Express (France)

"An unforgettable novel...a project with strong Kafkaesque and Camus-charged themes."
--Reinhard Baumgart, Die Zeit (Germany)

Author

© Imre Kertész
Imre Kertesz was born in Budapest in 1929. At age 15 he was deported to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, and finally to a subcamp at Zeitz, to labor in a factory where Nazi scientists were trying to convert coal into motor fuel. Upon liberation in 1945 he worked as a journalist before being fired for not adhering to the 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 The Failure and Kaddish for an Unborn Child. Subsequent titles include Liquidation, Union Jack, and, most recently, a memoir, The File on K. In 2002, Kertesz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Budapest and Berlin. View titles by Imre Kertész

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