The Union Jack
  • Published: 1 December 2010
  • ISBN: 9781933633879
  • Imprint: Melville House
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $29.99

The Union Jack

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The Union Jack will be sought out by readers of Holocaust literature and the literature of what Kertesz calls the "disaster world" of totalitarianism; readers of literature in translation, particularly European fiction; readers, especially, of Thomas Mann and Thomas Bernhard.

"It was...unnecessary for me to fret about who the murderer was: Everybody was."

A haunting, never-before-translated, autobiographical novella by the 2002 Nobel Prize winner.

An unnamed narrator recounts a simple anecdote, his sighting of the Union Jack—the British Flag—during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, in the few days preceding the uprising's brutal repression by the Soviet army. In the telling, partly a digressive meditation on "the absurd order of chance," he recalls his youthful self, and the epiphanies of his intellectual and spiritual awakening—an awakening to a kind of radical subjectivity. In his Nobel address Kertesz remembered:

"I, on a lovely spring day in 1955, suddenly came to the realization that there exists only one reality, and that is me, my own life, this fragile gift bestowed for an uncertain time, which had been seized, expropriated by alien forces, and circumscribed, marked up, branded—and which I had to take back from 'History', this dreadful Moloch, because it was mine and mine alone..."

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 Kertész, 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.
  • Published: 1 December 2010
  • ISBN: 9781933633879
  • Imprint: Melville House
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $29.99
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About the author

Imre Kertesz

Imre Kertész was born in 1929 in Budapest. As a youth, he was imprisoned in Auschwitz and later in Buchenwald. He worked as a journalist and playwright before publishing Fateless, his first novel, in 1975. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. Imre Kertész died in Budapest in March 2016

portrait photo of Imre Kertesz

Also by Imre Kertesz

Detective Story
Liquidation
Fateless
Kaddish For An Unborn Child
See all

Praise for The Union Jack

"Imre Kertész explores the possibility of continuing to live and think as an individual in an era in which the subjection of human beings to social forces has become increasingly complete." -- from the Nobel citation

"...[H]is approach to it is less documentary or memoir-driven, more an enormous effort to understand and find a language for what the Holocaust says about the human condition." -- George Szirtes, Times Literary Supplement

"...[S]earching and visionary beyond the usual parameters." - Sven Birkerts, Bookforum

"In explaining something of the weight and importance of Kertész's subjects and creative achievements, it is hard to convey simultaneously the deftness and vivacity of his writing: his sheer joy in making something new with words. Tim Wilkinson must be deeply responsive to Kertész's delight in language to convey it so pervasively in his translations. There is something quintessentially youthful and life-affirming in this writer's sensibility..." - Ruth Scurr, The Nation

—George Szirtes, Times Literary Supplement

"...Searching and visionary beyond the usual parameters."

—Sven Birkets, Bookforum

"In explaining something of the weight and importance of Kertész'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