These early notes from the estate of the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész, written between 1958 and 1962, deal with the creation of his masterpiece "Novel destinyless" (1975).

This makes the book, for which the author received the Nobel Prize - the description of National Socialist camps from the perspective of a fourteen-year-old boy - one of the best-documented works in world literature of the twentieth century.

Paul Ingenday

Europe correspondent for the feuilleton in Berlin.

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However, the novel has little to do with “processing”, “coping” and similar clinical vocabulary, with which the German language seems to take revenge on every artistic will to give the unspeakable an aesthetic form.

The working title, which the thirty-year-old author found in March 1960, is "Vacation in the camp".

A bad title, an early Kertész sarcasm, because it is about the deportation of a Jewish boy to Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Fourteen-year-old Kertész spent nine months there, lost weight, saw misery and death before being freed in April 1945.

In 1960, under the impression of reading Dostoyevsky, Camus and Thomas Mann, he wrote that he wanted to write his “own mythology”, and that primarily affected the awareness gained in the camp that the person who experienced this had irrevocably changed that it is "impossible to resume his appointed place in the world of order, the place due to a boy, to him who bears within him the knowledge of death".

One of the most original decisions concerns the tone of the novel, which has already shocked many readers with its lightness, almost as if the book lacked existential seriousness.

In any case, there is no talk of the tremolo of the tragic.

"I have to find a kind of childlike purity for the narrator's voice," writes Kertész at the beginning of his reflections.

Instead of an awareness of horror and genocide: the naive amazement of a young person who takes the world as it is.

In this way, the author believes that his novel becomes "doubly painful", precisely because "I throw out everything that is horrible and put the emphasis on poetry".

That is the lasting affront, the speechless boldness of this novel: to show what Auschwitz gave to this one man, not stolen from him.

Much later, in 1992,

Buchenwald, the truth of his life

Of course it takes him a long time to get there, even if the earliest ideas for the novel are brilliant, almost too clever for the book they are meant to be.

The greatest contradiction in his life is that he works with a friend to write successful comedies that keep him alive, while his real ambition is prose.

Up until the mid-1960s, the smoothness of his stage production, coupled with the compulsion for interruptions, seems to mock any more serious artistic endeavor, and his harsh judgments of the theater of those years - Brecht finds him "conceited, stupid, German, loudmouthed, empty". , Tennessee Williams as “junk, commerce, obsolete”—certainly have to do with his reluctant writing duties.