The Union Jack

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

In this haunting, never-before-translated autobiographical novella, an unnamed narrator recounts a simple anecdote, his sighting of the Union Jack during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 in the few days preceding the uprising's brutal repression by the Soviet army. In telling the story, he recalls his youthful self and the intellectual and spiritual epiphanies he experienced during this time. Filled with digressive meditations on the absurd order of chance, his story is ultimately that of a gradual awakening to a kind of radical subjectivity.

Reviews

Praise for Imre Kertsz

"...An enormous effort to understand and find a language for what the Holocaust says about the human condition."
George Szirtes, Times Literary Supplement

"...Searching and visionary beyond the usual parameters."
Sven Birkets, Bookforum

"In explaining something of the weight and importance of Kertesz's subjects and creative achievements, it is hard to convey simultaneously the deftness and vivacity of his writing....There is something quintessentially youthful and life-affirming in this writer's sensibility..."
Ruth Scurr, The Nation

Kertsz's work is a profound meditation on the great and enduring themes of love, death and the problem of evil, although for Kertsz, it's not evil that is the problem but good.
John Banville, author of The Sea

Author Bio

IMRE KERT SZ was born in 1929 in Budapest. As a youth, he was imprisoned first in Auschwitz and later in Buchenwald. He worked as a journalist and playwright before publishing FATELESSNESS, his first novel, in 1975. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002.