Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature by Louise O. Vasv�ri , T�t�sy de Zepetnek (review)

Abstract

reviews 715 1932 essay 'The End of the Baroque'. This article's conclusive remarks, sug gesting thatBelyi's views oscillated between abstract music ideals and writing's materiality, could be strengthened with a comparison toTynianov's cultural models highlighting the dynamic struggle of competing discourses. The collection, stretchingfromBlok's representation of revolutionary forces to analysis of gnostic cosmologies inAitmatov's and Pelevin's works (offered by Avrahm Brown, pp. 533-53), surveys a wide range of themes on twentieth centuryRussian literature, contains a selected bibliography of publications by Olga Raevsky Hughes and Robert Hughes (pp. 554-64), and will be appreci ated by scholars and students interested inRussian modernism and emigre literature. Universityof Edinburgh Alexandra Smith Vasvari, Louise O. and Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven (eds). ImreKertesz and Holocaust Literature.Comparative Cultural Studies. Purdue University Press, West Lafayette, IN, 2005. 335 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95 (paperback). This volume in theComparative Cultural Studies of Purdue University Press comprises twenty-one studies devoted to the work of the first Hungarian writer to win a Nobel Prize for Literature (in 2002) and also includes a complementary review-article on Jewish identityand antisemitism inCentral European culture, an extensive bibliography ofworks by and about Kertesz (down to the end of 2004), as well as hitherto unavailable excerpts inTim Wilkinson's fluent translation fromhis diary-journal Gdlyanaplo (Galley Boat-log), which shed lighton themajor works already available in translation. All the authors of the papers bar one come from either that swathe of the Northern hemisphere which experienced fascism directly (fromHungary through to Croatia, Germany and France) or theAnglo-Saxon world (espe ciallyNorth America) that just escaped it,and approach the clutch of prob lems raised by Kertesz's work, particularly his novel Sorstalansdg (Fatelessness), from a dizzying variety of historical, philosophical, literary and (less success fully)psychological perspectives. As might be expected, thismakes the collec tion somewhat uneven, but the difficulty of commenting on the volume is exacerbated by the Introduction's failure to make a case for the collection as a whole: it consists largely of abstracts of the papers arranged, as are the papers themselves, in unenlightening alphabetical order of contributor. The rest of thework is (also)word-processed, rather than properly edited (clunking English in several of the translated pieces; some incomplete sentences; and Primo Levi's name, for example, is consistently misspelt). Nevertheless, the reader interested in getting a handle on Kertesz's undoubtedly challenging texts isbound to find something here thatwill help. Two historians, for example, offer essential historical background. Andras Gero attempts to tease out the interweavings of the 'Identities of theJew and the Hungarian', to which Andras Kovacs adds a further dimension, vital for anyone tackling the history books, on 'The Historians' Debates about the Holocaust inHungary'. Philosophical concepts fromAdorno and Hegel, in 716 seer, 86, 4, October 2008 particular, are brought to bear in the pieces by Robert Eaglestone and Amos Friedland, the former stressing the 'nature of the failure of choice and agency as aporia rather than either tragedy or redemption' (p. 48) in the works accessible to him inEnglish, the latter considering the issue of reconciliation through the problematic, nostalgic evocation inFatelessness of the 'beautiful' concentration camp and the hero's 'happiness' therein. A number of attempts are made to provide some literary(-historical) context for the oeuvre, Eniko Molnar Basa limitingherself to theHungarian side,while Paul Varnai is read able about itsplace inHolocaust literaturemore generally; Tamas Scheibner contributes a meticulous analysis ofKertesz's Jegyzokonyv(SwornStatement), with telling cross-cuts to Sorstalansdg. In fact, useful comparative remarks are fre quent throughout the collection and not only in the essayswith specific names in their tide (such as that ofDanilo Kis in the essay byRosana Ratkovcic and Jorge Semprun's in that byMarie Peguy): Julia Karolle looks at Fatelessness as historical fiction, and in an incisive essay that can be recommended to any newcomer one of the co-editors, Louise O. Vasvari, is persuasive about Sorstalansdgs parallels with Camus's Uetranger even as she positions Kertesz's 'daringly innovative text' as 'the ultimate Holocaust novel, which subvert [s] the rhetorical and narrative myths of itspredecessors through defamiliariza tion, irony,humor and elements of self-parody' (p...