Fiasco

Praise

“Heroic….Kertész is unique in Holocaust literature….[H]e seems to flaunt the thoughts and feelings that contradict the accepted narrative.”
—Nan Goldberg, The Boston Globe

“[A] powerful book…. If Fatelessness was written with a bright mock-naivety that led to comparisons with Candide, and Kaddish employed the harsh comic rant of Thomas Bernhard, then the presiding ghosts of Fiasco are clearly Beckett and Kafka, those 20th-century masters of confusion and despair.”
—Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine

“[O]ne of the best renderings of what it must have been like to survive a Nazi murder camp.”
—The Los Angeles Times

“Fiasco plays with the art of bearing witness with great risk and proclaims the magnitude of what’s becoming an endangered species, the individual, whose death in this century has been repeatedly proclaimed, celebrated and here, denied.”
–Hans-Harald Muller, Die Welt (Germany)

“We knew Imre Kertesz capable of dry wit  in the most horrific moments, but his representation of the socialist world reveals a great sense of humor that we did not know about…here we all laugh. And we laugh intelligently.”
—L’Express (France)

“An unforgettable novel…a project with strong Kafkaesque and Camus-charged themes.”
–Reinhard Baumgart, Die Zeit (Germany)