Fiasco

By Imre Kertész and Tim Wilkinson

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781612193298

Reviews for Fiasco

[inaudible · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book, like the rest of Kertesz's work, should be read by everyone who loves literature. Absolutely amazing.

[lunarreader · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An intriguing book about a writer who has to write, has written or will write a novel. Mysterious, yes? :)The author tells about an author that has written a book and later the book itself appears and has as subject .... an author needing to write a book. Towards the end, the book is written, past tense and present tense get together and the author (the first, but also the second) drops dead. Kertész uses this story in a story to tell another one: the oppression by the communist regime, the past horrors by the nazis in Budapest, the not so free speech, telling each other messages in a cryptic style like "things have changed" .... "why has it changed?" .... "will we ever find out?" .... "you're right, we won't" .... "anyhow, it's not important ..." It is clear that there is a lot of mocking the system ongoing without ever really mentionning it and leaving unexplained if the story is really in Budapest or somewhere else, brilliantly formulated by Kertész. So this book is rather brilliant in it's setup, but gets sometime a bit tiring for the reader. Not your five minute read on a bus, but a true masterpiece for the lovers of political and social irony, books on book writing, and observations of the human, twisted, mind.