Bookslut on Kertesz

Bookslut reviews Imre Kertesz’s Detective Story:

As a chronicler of the Holocaust and its aftermath, Nobel Prize-winner Imre Kertesz allows no redemption and no transcendence. If you cry while reading Fatelessness or Kaddish for an Unborn Child, you’ll cry bitter, furious tears, but most likely, you won’t be able cry at all. A terrible white ball of impossibility will grow in your throat and pinch your mind and your soul. His approach to life after Auschwitz is closer to Primo Levi’s (whose poem “Kaddish” curses those who go about their daily lives without considering atrocity, and who portrays the Holocaust not as some historical aberration, but as the truth about humanity) than to Roberto Benigni’s (whose Life is Beautiful was the favorite movie of Pope John Paul II). Even when Kertesz isn’t writing about Auschwitz, he’s writing about Auschwitz.