Post­ed by Nao­mi Firestone-Teeter

Melville House is pub­lish­ing Imre Kertész’s Fias­co lat­er this month. Con­sid­ered to be the ​“untrans­lat­ed ​“miss­ing” book from the tril­o­gy that won Imre Kertész the Nobel Prize,”Fias­co con­tin­ues the sto­ry that Kertész began with Fate­less­ness and Kad­dish for an Unborn Child. More from the publisher:

Fias­co, as Imre Kertész 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 a joy­less child­hood. It is, in short, a sear­ing exten­sion of Kertész’s fun­da­men­tal theme: the total­i­tar­i­an expe­ri­ence seen as trau­ma not only for an indi­vid­ual, but for the whole civ­i­liza­tion – ours – that made Auschwitz possible.

Read more here.