{"id":5554,"date":"2011-03-28T15:50:43","date_gmt":"2011-03-28T19:50:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=5554"},"modified":"2016-06-27T18:57:03","modified_gmt":"2016-06-27T22:57:03","slug":"imre-kertesz-fiasco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2011\/03\/28\/imre-kertesz-fiasco\/","title":{"rendered":"Imre Kert\u00e9sz: Fiasco<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
Fiasco<\/strong><\/em><\/span>\r\nby Imre\u00a0Kert\u00e9sz (A kudarc<\/em>, 1988)<\/span>\r\ntranslated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson (2011)<\/span>\r\nMelville House (2011)<\/span>\r\n368 pp<\/span><\/pre>\n
Imre\u00a0Kert\u00e9sz was one of the first authors I reviewed on this blog.\u00a0The other books in his tetralogy (Fatelessness<\/em>, Kaddish for an Unborn Child<\/em>, and\u00a0Liquidation<\/em>) are brilliant.\u00a0(For some reason Melville House doesn’t consider\u00a0Liquidation<\/em> a part of this sequence, so they call it a trilogy.) I couldn’t wait to get the missing piece — trilogy or tetralogy — Fiasco<\/em>.\u00a0I was thrilled when I found out Melville House was publishing it.\u00a0I must not have been the only one waiting because the back of this book, where a little synopsis would appear, it simply says, “Finally: the heretofore untranslated\u00a0‘missing’ book\u00a0from the trilogy that won Imre\u00a0Kert\u00e9sz the Nobel Prize.”<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Despite the lack of synopsis, it is no secret what this book is about. Kert\u00e9sz, a survivor of the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, who when released quickly found himself in another totalitarian regime that was Communist Hungary, doesn’t write about anything else.<\/p>\n
So why read more Kert\u00e9sz if you’ve read one? Because Kert\u00e9sz’s writing\u00a0expresses many things besides\u00a0the horror of the Holocaust (though never does it forget the horror of the Holocaust). For one, his characters often remark on the irrationality of their existence — no, the arbitrariness under which he suffered, the absurdity of life. I believe this passage from Fiasco<\/em> gives a great sense of this. This is Kert\u00e9sz writing as Kert\u00e9sz:<\/p>\n
Well then, at the time I came into the world the Sun was standing in the greatest economic crisis the world had ever known; from the Empire State Building to the Turulhawk statues on the former Franz Josef Bridge, people were diving headlong from every prominence on the face of the earth into water, chasm, onto paving stone — wherever they could; a party leader by the name of Adolf Hitler looked exceedingly inimically upon me from amidst the pages of his book Mein Kampf<\/em>; the first of Hungary’s Jewish laws, the so-called Numerus Clausus<\/em>, stood at its culmination before its place was taken by the remainder.\u00a0Every earthly sign (I have no idea about the heavenly ones) attested to the superfluousness — indeed, the irrationality — of my birth.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Kaddish for an Unborn Child<\/em> and Liquidation<\/em> are the two books that most accutely express the idea of the “superfluousness” of a birth, which rings as a type of philosophy. In one, a man rages and mourns a\u00a0child he doesn’t have because he couldn’t bear to see one born; in the other, a man doesn’t commit suicide because it would be redundant. They’re devastating books, but the intelligence behind them, which is surprisingly touched with compassion, makes them sublime.<\/p>\n
Another reason for reading anything you can by Kert\u00e9sz is that the books are always unique in structure.\u00a0Fatelessness<\/em> seems the most conventional, but\u00a0Kaddish for an Unborn Child<\/em> is essentially one long sentence (that works) and Liquidation<\/em> is begins with a play the main character wrote that tells the details of his death — it even gets his friends’ reactions right, word-for-word.<\/p>\n
Fiasco<\/em> is also unique.\u00a0 We begin here:<\/p>\n
The old boy was standing in front of the filing cabinet.\u00a0 He was thinking.\u00a0It was midmorning.\u00a0(Relatively — getting on for ten).\u00a0Around this time the old boy was always in the habit of having a think.<\/span><\/p>\n
He had plenty of troubles and woes, so there were things to think about.<\/span><\/p>\n
But the old boy was not thinking about what he ought to have been thinking about.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The old boy, it turns out, is Kert\u00e9sz (though it is never explicit).\u00a0There he is, thinking, as is often the case midmorning.\u00a0(Relatively — getting on for ten).\u00a0The book begins rather simply.\u00a0I’d like to draw a comparison, if I could, to the canon form in music.\u00a0The first line of music is the old boy standing by the filing cabinet.\u00a0Another note comes in (a few pages later):<\/p>\n
“I’m just standing here in front of the filing cabinet and thinking,” the old boy as thinking, “instead of actually doing something.”<\/span><\/p>\n
Well certainly, the truth is — not to put too fine a point on it — that he should long ago have settled down to writing a book.<\/span><\/p>\n
For the old boy wrote books.<\/span><\/p>\n
That was his occupation.<\/span><\/p>\n
Or rather, to be more precise, things had so transpired that this had become his occupation (seeing as he had no other occupation).<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Throughout the first part (the first 115 pages),\u00a0these phrases will be repeated as others are added, much of what comes building on and incorporating what came before.\u00a0As the part progresses, it becomes more and more complex, and more and more murky, though relationships between ideas become clearer.\u00a0It might sound frustrating, but it was very satisfying reading.\u00a0Kert\u00e9sz may have challenging structures, but I’ve always found his writing (surely, thanks to superb translating from Tim Wilkinson) to flow smoothly.\u00a0This was no different.\u00a0It remains clear what is going on, so the effect of the above is not to confuse but to give us a window into the mind of the old boy sitting at the filing cabinet, getting thoroughly worked up about the prospect of writing a book.<\/p>\n
The old boy has already written one book, which, at first, was not well received.\u00a0Take, for example, this letter from a prospective publisher:<\/p>\n
We consider that your way of giving artistic expression to the material of your experience does not come off, while the subject itself is horrific and shocking.\u00a0His behaviour, his gauche comments . . . annoyed . . . the novel’s ending, since the behaviour the main protagonist has displayed hitherto . . . gives him no ground to dispense moral judgements.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This book the publishers disliked so much is Fatelessness<\/em>, which does indeed have a narrator with a surprising tone that might come off as cynical and, well, gauche, particularly as he seems to lack the\u00a0reverence we as society might deem appropriate given the content.<\/p>\n
So, much of part one is the old boy thinking about writing his next book while also remembering the process of writing (and the agony of publishing) his first book.\u00a0In the filing cabinet are his old papers, which he reads (and which we get nice long passages of).\u00a0Though he\u00a0was there, he still gets a shock — practically gasps with surprise — when he reads,\u00a0“I could be gunned down anywhere, at any time.”\u00a0The result of all of this mixing and building is a masterful part one that goes into the process of writing about experience, and about experiencing the Holocaust in particular:<\/p>\n
As I was reading this passage, these memories came alive within me, and at the same time I was able to verify that the sentences fitted together in the organic sequence I had envisaged.\u00a0That was all very well, but why had not what existed before<\/em> those sentences, the raw event itself, that once-real morning in Auschitz, come to life for me?\u00a0How could it be that those sentences for me contained merely imaginary<\/em> events, an imaginary cattle truck, an imaginary Auschwitz, and an imaginary fourteen-and-a-half-year-old boy, even though I myself had at one time been that fourteen-and-a-half-year-old boy?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
He finds it hard to reconcile the art that goes into recreating the experience with the real experience itself. He also speaks about the capacity of a reader to really understand this work of the imagination. To illustrate, he tells the awful story of 340 Jews who were killed.<\/p>\n
[T]hat these 340 deaths on the rocks, for instance, might rightly find a place among the symbols of the human imagination — but on one condition: only if they had not occurred.\u00a0Since they did occur, it is hard even to imagine them.\u00a0Rather than becoming a plaything, the imagination proves to be a heavy and immovable burden, just like those boulders in Mauthausen: people do not want to be crushed under them.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So this is part one, only about a third of the book, and already I’ve exhausted the space I usually take to write a review.\u00a0What is the second part?\u00a0Well, the old boy finally settles down to write his next book.\u00a0And the second part is the book the old boy writes.\u00a0Like\u00a0Fatelessness<\/em>, it features Georg K\u00f6ves, that fourteen-year-old boy we first met at the railroad tracks at Auschwitz.\u00a0The war is over, and Georg is no longer in a concentration camp.\u00a0However, he soon finds himself in Communist Hungary.\u00a0And he has an urge to write a book about his experiences in the concentration camps.<\/p>\n
To be honest, as much as I loved the first part, I only admired the second part.\u00a0It was long and felt, uncharacteristically of Kert\u00e9sz, long-winded.\u00a0I wasn’t as enthralled with the ideas or with K\u00f6ves’s life.\u00a0That said, when the time comes to reread Kert\u00e9sz, I’ll not hesitate a second to reread this book\u00a0with his others.\u00a0It is a great, layered look at the process of writing a book that never lets the reader forget the horrors the book is recounting — indeed, they are emphasized.<\/p>\n
Thank you Melville House and Tim Wilkinson for making it finally available in English.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Trevor reviews Nobel Prize winner Imre Kert\u00e9sz\u2019s Fiasco<\/em>. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5592,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[800,42],"tags":[878,910,546,982,547],"coauthors":[505],"class_list":["post-5554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-imre-kertesz","tag-1980s","tag-910","tag-hungarian","tag-melville-house","tag-nobel-prize"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/Fiasco.jpg?fit=353%2C530&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-1rA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5554"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18968,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5554\/revisions\/18968"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5554"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=5554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}