A végső kocsma by Imre Kertész

Abstract

intrude upon his new family’s happiness: he eventually comes to realize that he himself has destroyed the new home that he had, almost miraculously, been able to build with his wife. Nor is Judith unharmed by loutish antiSemitism : she will never forget a certain childhood slight. The novel begins with a letter written by Marc, Salim’s and Judith’s son, to his twin sister before his rather implausible invasion of, and Molotov-cocktail -fueled attack from, the “Orange House” in which his father had grown up. He envisions “[walking] down this little track . . . until we reach the sea.” In the last sentence of the novel, the previously estranged Salim and Judith will make this very walk, and reconciliation of a sort is offered. So Hajaj’s heart is in the right place. She makes great efforts to be fair to the two sides of an apparently insoluble conflict, acknowledging the faults and anguish of each. The prose is sometimes flat and the dialogue occasionally unconvincing, but she is by no means bereft of novelistic promise. Oneworld’s publicity handout quotes the Library Journal’s praise for an “accessible and beautifully rendered work that makes the tragedy of the Middle East real; highly recommended.” Perhaps one day Hajaj will write a novel worthy of this accolade. M. D. Allen University of Wisconsin, Fox Valley Imre Kertész. A végső kocsma. Zoltán Hafner, ed. Budapest. Magvető. 2014. isbn 9789631427738 The Nobel Prize–winning writer Imre Kert ész always focused his writing on two broad themes: the Holocaust and his own experience of post-Holocaust existence (see WLT, April 2003). A végső kocsma (The final tavern) may well be Kertész’s swan song (he is over eighty-five), and it also fits the above pattern with a somewhat disjointed, postmodern structure. This book, then, is no conventional fiction . Neither is it just a collection of aphorisms or personal notes; what we find here are two sketches for a would-be novel separated by entries from Kertész’s diaries from 2001 onward. For students of his work, these notes are most valuable, although they hardly occasion surprise. While the author rejects vindictive nationalism, he is not in favor of multiculturalism either, finding the threat of extremist Islam growing by leaps and bounds. One of his recurring themes is identity, a much-discussed problem in twenty-first-century Europe. Kertész denies having either a totally Hungarian or a dominant Jewish identity— he claims that in fact he is successor to the presently nonexistent Jewish literature of Eastern Europe, mostly written in German. “My misfortune,” he says, “is that I write in Hungarian, but I am fortunate because I was translated into German.” This statement leaves open two questions: whether Kertész writing in his native tongue enriched not only European but also Hungarian literature and, if so, whether his work—now available in most languages—could have been written with the same intensity in a “borrowed” language, for instance in German. While acknowledging his indebtedness to Kafka and Camus, Kertész on the whole steers clear of modern/contemporary literature. He has a soft spot for János Pilinszky, the Catholic existentialist poet, and at one point he quotes Rilke, but on the whole he enjoys music more than poetry. While admired by András Schiff and having a good relationship with Daniel Barenboim, his friendship with composer György Ligeti steadily deteriorates. First, he seems to be touched by the Hungarianborn composer’s “moving frailness” and his determination to carry on working in spite of his physical condition, but when he finds out that Ligeti did not respond well to his more recent writing, the tone of his remarks becomes bitter. He complains A Coney Island Reader Louis J. Parascandola & John Parascandola, eds. Columbia University Press Coney Island is a shape-shifter. The dichotomy of shiny entertainment against urban decay has always caused mixed emotions. From Nathan’s Hotdogs and the Wonder Wheel to end-of-season gloom and recession, Coney sings the bright and dim electric song of Brooklyn’s iconic peninsula. This literary anthology unfolds the layers of the unique destination while enhancing the experience...