Dossier K: A Memoir
Kertész received the Nobel Prize in 1992, and his first novel, Fatelessness (1975), ranks among the half-dozen most important and instructive works about the Holocaust. Dossier K. is further evidence, if needed, that Kertész’s sensibility defies classification. To call him unique would be to miss the point; it would diminish his frankness, his modesty, his shocking honesty that, he would remind us, is not the same as telling the truth. Dossier K. appears to be an extended interview. Kertész as biographer questions Kertész the autobiographical novelist (he was deported to Auschwitz from Budapest as a teenager, and liberated from Buchenwald in 1945) about his life, trying and resolutely failing to create a narrative arc from that deeply unfashionable excess called existence: “One is not born for anything in particular, but if one manages to stay alive long enough, then one cannot avoid eventually becoming something.” There are myriad insights in this book, more than enough to occupy an open, inquisitive mind for years. A necessary work, beautifully translated. --Michael Autrey