The 3 best books by Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész

In 2016 he left us Imre Kertész, Hungarian writer 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature. We are talking about a writer forcibly invaded creatively by his stay in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald when he was only 14 years old.

In cases like Kertész in the end almost every exercise in narrative turns into a biography in disguise, in a hodgepodge of dreams and ideas forged in the hells of the tragedies that he had to live.

Only in this way can we proceed to the exorcization of what we have experienced. Novelize to delve into the surrealism of living, novel to end up looking for a point of humor, thus throwing a sly smile at the world, a world that not only has not destroyed you, but has made you a true writer, a survivor of horrors. .

And among the task of creative liberation itself, questions always creep in about how the human being can become the monster. How can a society remain impassive in the face of the horrors of a surgically inserted ideal.

Kertész was not a prolific writer, but his creations are read today with essential humanity.

3 recommended novels by Imre Kertész

Sin destino

The most paradoxical thing in the hackneyed metaphor of the train as opportunity or life is that the trains to the concentration camps did not have any type of opportunity or destination.

Transforming the experiences of a teenager amidst the horrors into a kind of delirious search for happiness becomes a literary trick, a final effect that deciphers the ungovernable need of our cells to always survive, thus capable of convincing us of the oasis in the desert or of a stroke of luck in a new dawn ...

Summary: History of the year and a half of the life of a teenager in various Nazi concentration camps (experience that the author lived in his own flesh), "Without Destiny" is not, however, an autobiographical text.

With the cold objectivity of the entomologist and from an ironic distance, Kertész shows us in his story the hurtful reality of the death camps in their most effectively perverse effects: those that confuse justice and arbitrary humiliation, and the most inhuman everyday life with an aberrant form of happiness.

A dispassionate witness, "Destiny" is, above all, great literature, and one of the best novels of the twentieth century, capable of leaving a deep and imperishable mark on the reader.

Sin destino

A detective story

A more lively proposal, a book that can be read for entertainment purposes in the detective genre, but that in the end ends up leaving the necessary existential residue that governed the Hungarian author.

Summary: A member of the secret police of a Latin American country without specifying, tells shortly before being executed his experience in the Corps. In this way, the questions that Imre Kertész always asks us reappear: How is human being involved in the machinery of a dictatorship? How do you get to participate in it?

In this case, Kertész narrates it from the perspective not of the victim, but of the executioner. With extreme economy, with coldness, he explains the fall of a man into moral indifference and the definitive impoverishment of the soul and thus finds one of the keys to understanding our time.

A detective story

The last inn

We all have a reserved ticket for the last inn. That last place where we will lie before leaving the scene. At the last inn each one makes a balance of their closed and pending accounts. The writer always has the advantage, he can close the vital accounting, the account of his days with greater profusion, approaching everything with a lucid sincerity, that of the last days ...

Summary: In a last artistic endeavor, a seriously ill writer conceives a text that constitutes a visceral and sometimes disturbing testimony of his experiences, and of the human being's struggle for dignity in extreme circumstances. In this way, Imre Kertész transforms the chronicle of his "anteroom to death" into a work of radical sincerity and overwhelming lucidity, with writing always on the horizon, as a justification for his existence. The last great work of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The last inn
5/5 - (8 votes)

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.