Defeat

Author: (Hungarian) Imre Kertész
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-10-01
Features: Imre Kertész, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born on November 9, 1929, in Budapest to a Jewish family. In 1944, at the age of 15, he was sent to the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz, Poland, and the following year was transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. He was liberated in May 1945. At the age of 19, he began working as a journalist at a newspaper in Budapest and was dismissed in 1951. From then on, he made a living by translating and writing. He has translated works by German writers such as Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal, Freud, and Wittgenstein, and has authored works such as Fateless, Fateless, and Prayer for the Unborn. Fateless is one of Kertész's shorter novels, narrated by a middle-aged man who later becomes a writer and literary translator. This man is tormented by the lingering effects of the past, grieves for his inability to raise a child in such a cruel world, and also interweaves memories of his failed marriage and career. This book, along with Prayer for the Unborn, is a sequel to the author's debut work, Fateless.