Imre Kertész, Nobel Prize for literature, died – The Point

Imre Kertész, the Hungarian writer and Nobel Prize for Literature died Thursday at the age of 86, leaving a work imbued with his experience of the Nazi concentration camps is also “a call against all dictatorships.” Declined for several years by the disease Parkison, the only Hungarian language of Nobel had left Berlin in 2013 to move back to Budapest, where he was born and where he died at dawn on Thursday in his home according to information from the Hungarian editions Magveto.

Born November 9, 1929, deported to Auschwitz at the age of 15, Kertész is a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, including books, which draw his experience of the Holocaust, are often compared to the work of the Italian Primo Levi, the Spaniard Jorge Semprun or American Elie Wiesel. “It was these Jewish writers in Europe that could only belong to one nation due to his injuries and universal perspective of his work on the Holocaust,” testified to Agence France-Presse Gabor T. Szanto , editor of Hungarian literary magazine Szombat , who regularly rubbed shoulders.

His first book, the best known, Fateless ( Sosrtalansag ) tells the story of a young deportee Köves, sober manner, ironic and distanced. His work “evokes his fate with a love of life, he speaks almost gleefully,” remarked in 2002 his friend the historian and journalist François Fetjo, noting “a contradiction, a tension that is quite strange” and sometimes hurts understand about him, especially in his country with which they had an ambiguous relationship. Kertész answered: “I presented the facts as they were, not the facts as they appeared in the consciousness of everyone afterwards. “

” Finding a distance “

Fateless , on which he worked for ten years and was first published in indifference in 1975, was finally recognized as a work “that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history, and defends individual thought against the submission to the political power,” according to Nobel jury. This “barbaric arbitrariness” that is clean in all authoritarian systems, regularly denounced this man to classical elegance, off receding hairline.

“At Auschwitz I was a child. I have understood what I had experienced in Auschwitz that under the Communist dictatorship, who never liked my books because she felt they contained explosives: a kind of appeal against all dictatorships and not only against the Nazi dictatorship, “he confided after its price. Revenue in Budapest after the war, Imre Kertész had worked as a journalist until his journal should adopt the Communist Party line. Sidelined by the regime, he then spent his inner rage sieve with an iron requirement. “Between 1961 and 1973, I started 500 times the beginning of Fateless to find a distance, a structure, a framework where words can have their life,” he had said.

Author of a dozen books

“After a very long period of anonymity, I became famous,” noted without bitterness this translator of German-speaking authors, as Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler and Freud, who influenced his work. “It’s a bon vivant, a very jovial man, strangely gay who likes to party, loves the company,” remarked François Fetjo while Sabine Wolf, director of literary archives of the Academy of Arts in Berlin, paid tribute to “a man of great finesse.” Based in Berlin between 2001 and 2013, he bequeathed to the Academy of Arts all its archives.

If in 2012 criticized the populist conservative government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Imre Kertesz was criticized back in 2014, by the opposition press, for accepting a tribute of the same Orban. He is the author of ten books, including Kaddish for the child who will not be born (1990) and Liquidation (2004). The Ultimate Inn , his last story published in 2015 in France by Actes Sud, evoked “the duel between his Parkinson’s disease and writing a new novel,” according to the editor contributed to its recognition and keeps the memory of a “simple and loving man.”