About the Book
"Original and chilling."--The New York Review of Books"From Imre Kertesz, the winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature, we have come to expect novels where [his] detectives track themselves, seeking to apprehend their own role in 'the logic' of authoritarianism. . . . From a recipe with these ingredients, it is hard to imagine anything but the highest seriousness. The Pathseeker doesn't disappoint. . . . Kafka comes to mind."--Harper's Magazine
"The Pathseeker is a necessary addition to Mr. Kertesz's work in English, and should occasion thanks to both the novelist and his translator, Tim Wilkinson, who has rendered Mr. Kertesz's (famously difficult) Hungarian into a flowing, able English--as well as to Melville House's fascinating 'The Contemporary Art of the Novella' series, which rubric The Pathseeker falls under. . . . And with the introduction of The Pathseeker into English, after 30 years of silence, we should pay grateful and careful attention."--New York Sun
The new Contemporary Art of the Novella series launches with this stunning work from Nobel Prize-winner Imre Kertesz, author of Kaddish for an Unborn Child and Fatelessness. In a major work never before translated, the acclaimed Auschwitz survivor continues his blistering investigation of the methodologies of totalitarianism.
In a mysterious middle-European country, a relentless government detective slowly comes to suspect that he's under investigation himself--but for what and by whom? His banal travels become more and more tense and ominous as the examiner senses his own examination with a building sense of paranoia and powerlessness.
Stylish and unblinking, in a limpid translation by Tim Wilkinson, thishaunting tale transcends the genre it spoofs so mercilessly as Kertesz lays bare an emotional and psychological landscape ravaged by totalitarianism.
Imre Kertesz was born in Hungary in 1929 and, as a teenager, was imprisoned in Auschwitz by the Nazis. The author of numerous novels and stories, few of which have been translated into English, he won the Nobel Prize in 2002 for "writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history."
Tim Wilkinson has translated Kertesz's acclaimed Kaddish for an Unborn Child, Liquidation, and Fatelessness.
"There's no such thing as chance...only injustice."
From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for "writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history..."
The acclaimed Hungarian Holocaust survivor Imre Kertesz continues his investigation of the malignant methodologies of totalitarianism in a major work of fiction.
In a mysterious middle-European country, a man identified only as "the commissioner" undertakes what seems to be a banal trip to a nondescript town with his wife--a brief detour on the way to a holiday at the seaside--that turns into something ominous. Something terrible has happened in the town, something that no one wants to discuss. With his wife watching on fearfully, he commences a perverse investigation, rudely interrogating the locals, inspecting a local landmark with a frightening intensity, traveling to an outlying factory where he confronts the proprietors ... and slowly revealing a past he's been trying to suppress.
In a limpid translation by Tim Wilkinson, this haunting tale lays bare an emotional and psychological landscape ravaged by totalitarianism in one of Kertsz's most devastating examinations of the responsibilities of and for the Holocaust.
The Contemporary Art of the Novella series is designed to highlight work by major authors from around the world. In most instances, as with Imre Kertesz, it showcases work never before published; in others, books are reprised that should never have gone out of print. It is intended that the series feature many well-known authors and some exciting new discoveries. And as with the original series, The Art of the Novella, each book is a beautifully packaged and inexpensive volume meant to celebrate the form and its practitioners.