The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Pathseeker, by Imre Kertész
Reviewed by Robert Buckeye

Untitled document

Trans. and afterword Tim Wilkinson. Melville House, 2008. 129 pp. Paper: $13.00.

A man and his wife stop at an unnamed town, presumably in Europe, on their way to a seaside holiday. The man—he refers to himself as a guest and then later as "commissioner"—has, his wife feels, used their holiday trip as a pretext for this visit so that he might investigate an unmentioned crime (what he terms his “assignment”). He trusts no one in town and feels that he is watched; traps are being set for him. He cannot forget what the town refuses to acknowledge, but his efforts to make the past known bring back only the faintest memories of it: “[H]e set off on a path, or rather not a path but more a remembrance of footsteps on the ground, a threshold; it led on past the remains of an aged, fraying barbed-wire fence.” The next day at a factory that has become a tourist site, he sees among the camera-toting tourists those like himself whose experience of the place has compelled them to return, including a woman in a black mourning veil. Later, at a restaurant in town, she approaches him (“these two exiles from the victoriously reigning present”). Her father, younger brother, and fiancé, she tells him, were murdered. He is here, he tells her, to redress that injustice. “So that I should bear witness to everything I’ve seen.” There is only injustice, she tells him, and pulls aside her veil to confront him with a face, “no longer a face, but a yellow, desiccated, petrified simulacrum of a face.” The next morning at the train station he reads that the woman has hanged herself. He is a stranger here (he uses the word for the first time) and his investigation has done no more than convince himself of his existence. The Pathseeker follows Fatelessness, Kertész’s account of his experiences in Auschwitz when he was a teenager. One could not write poetry after Auschwitz, Theodor Adorno wrote, but for Kertész and those like him one could write nothing else, even if one could not write it. Fatelessness had been turned down by the state publisher because the camps were no longer of “topical interest.” In response, Kertész noted in his journal that, “Whatever I think about, I always think about Auschwitz. Even if I may seem to be talking about something quite different, I am still talking about Auschwitz.” At no point in The Pathseeker is Auschwitz mentioned, but the weight of it is everywhere, as it was for Kafka, who divined it in what he could see. Kertész’s work, along with that of Stefan Zweig, Sándor Márai, George Konrad, and others, heirs of Goethe and Tolstoy, represent the last, largely Jewish, flowering of a civil Central European culture, destroyed first by Fascism and then buried by Communism.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Pathseeker, by Imre Kertész Reviewed by Robert Buckeye Untitled document Trans. and afterword Tim Wilkinson. Melville House, 2008. 129 pp. Paper: $13.00. A man and his wife stop at an unnamed town, presumably in Europe, on their way to a seaside holiday. The man—he refers to himself as a guest and then later as "commissioner"—has, his wife feels, used their holiday trip as a pretext for this visit so that he might investigate an unmentioned crime (what he terms his “assignment”). He trusts no one in town and feels that he is watched; traps are being set for him. He cannot forget what the town refuses to acknowledge, but his efforts to make the past known bring back only the faintest memories of it: “[H]e set off on a path, or rather not a path but more a remembrance of footsteps on the ground, a threshold; it led on past the remains of an aged, fraying barbed-wire fence.” The next day at a factory that has become a tourist site, he sees among the camera-toting tourists those like himself whose experience of the place has compelled them to return, including a woman in a black mourning veil. Later, at a restaurant in town, she approaches him (“these two exiles from the victoriously reigning present”). Her father, younger brother, and fiancé, she tells him, were murdered. He is here, he tells her, to redress that injustice. “So that I should bear witness to everything I’ve seen.” There is only injustice, she tells him, and pulls aside her veil to confront him with a face, “no longer a face, but a yellow, desiccated, petrified simulacrum of a face.” The next morning at the train station he reads that the woman has hanged herself. He is a stranger here (he uses the word for the first time) and his investigation has done no more than convince himself of his existence. The Pathseeker follows Fatelessness, Kertész’s account of his experiences in Auschwitz when he was a teenager. One could not write poetry after Auschwitz, Theodor Adorno wrote, but for Kertész and those like him one could write nothing else, even if one could not write it. Fatelessness had been turned down by the state publisher because the camps were no longer of “topical interest.” In response, Kertész noted in his journal that, “Whatever I think about, I always think about Auschwitz. Even if I may seem to be talking about something quite different, I am still talking about Auschwitz.” At no point in The Pathseeker is Auschwitz mentioned, but the weight of it is everywhere, as it was for Kafka, who divined it in what he could see. Kertész’s work, along with that of Stefan Zweig, Sándor Márai, George Konrad, and others, heirs of Goethe and Tolstoy, represent the last, largely Jewish, flowering of a civil Central European culture, destroyed first by Fascism and then buried by Communism.

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