Fiasco

The Frame and the Story

Fiasco opens with an old man — referred to only as B — sitting in a small apartment in Budapest, observing a Writer who lives in the same building. The old man and the Writer may be the same person at different ages, or they may be distinct, or the distinction may not matter: Kertész leaves the ontological status of his narrators deliberately unstable. What is clear is that the Writer is working on a manuscript — a novel about a boy named Köves who is taken to the concentration camps and returns to Budapest to find that survival is a more complex problem than dying would have been. This manuscript is, in all but name, Fatelessness (1975).

The novel’s structure is therefore nested: we are reading Fiasco, which contains the writing of Fatelessness, which was itself the account of Kertész’s own experience in Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a teenager. The three layers — the old man, the Writer, and the boy Köves — are all versions of the same person at different distances from the same experience, and the novel’s formal project is to examine what happens to testimony as it moves through those distances.

The Budapest the Writer inhabits is 1970s communist Hungary: gray, surveilled, ideologically managed in the way that Soviet satellite states were managed. The Writer’s material circumstances are difficult — he is poor, his work is unpublishable in the current political climate, he exists at the margins of a literary culture that has no official interest in what he is trying to write. The specific hostility of communist Hungary to Holocaust testimony — officially framed as anti-fascist victory rather than Jewish catastrophe — means that the Writer’s isolation is doubled: he is cut off from his experience by time, and cut off from his potential audience by ideology.

Writing the Holocaust in Communist Hungary

The double isolation is Kertész’s great subject in Fiasco, and it is a subject that emerges from his specific historical position. Kertész was born in 1929, deported to Auschwitz in 1944 at the age of fourteen, and returned to a Budapest that had, by 1946, been transformed into a Soviet satellite state. The communist regime’s official account of World War II centered on the heroic Soviet liberation of fascist-occupied territories; the specifically Jewish dimension of the Nazi genocide was subordinated to a narrative in which class and ideology mattered more than ethnicity or religion. Jewish survivors in communist Hungary were not encouraged to identify as Jewish survivors. They were encouraged to understand themselves as victims of fascism who had been liberated by communism, and to be grateful.

This ideological pressure produced a particular form of historical amnesia in which the survivors of the camps found themselves doubly silenced: by the trauma of what they had experienced and by the official culture’s refusal to recognize what that experience had been. The Writer in Fiasco is writing against both silences simultaneously. He is trying to find language for the camps — the central project of all Holocaust literature — and he is also trying to find language for what it means to write about the camps in a country whose official culture insists the camps were something other than what they were.

Kertész’s formal response to this problem is the meta-fictional frame. By making the novel about the writing of Fatelessness rather than simply a sequel to it, he creates a space in which the act of testimony can be examined as an act: its costs, its compromises, its inevitable distortions of the original experience. The Writer knows that the novel he is writing is not identical to the experience he is drawing on — language is not experience, narrative is not memory — and the old man’s observation of the writing process functions as a continuous reminder of this gap.

The Kertész Trilogy

Fiasco is the second volume of Kertész’s autobiographical trilogy, sandwiched between Fatelessness (1975) and Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990). The three novels should be read in order, and Fiasco should not be read first: it depends on the reader’s knowledge of Fatelessness, and its formal innovations only become intelligible against the background of the more direct narrative that precedes it.

Fatelessness is one of the great novels of the twentieth century: a spare, strange account of a boy’s experience in the camps that is notable for its refusal of the conventional modes of Holocaust testimony — the outrage, the incomprehension, the insistence on horror — in favor of a flat, matter-of-fact narration that is itself a formal argument about what survival does to affect. Kaddish for an Unborn Child is a monologue by a Holocaust survivor who refuses to have children, a refusal he addresses directly to the unborn child who will not exist because of him. Fiasco is the formally most demanding of the three but also the one that most explicitly addresses the question that the trilogy circles around: what does a survivor owe to his experience, to the people who did not survive, and to the readers who will encounter the story he makes of it?

The Nobel Prize came in 2002, and the committee cited Kertész for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” Tim Wilkinson’s English translation of Fiasco is careful and accurate, preserving the formal strangeness of Kertész’s Hungarian prose without translating it into conventional English literary style. Readers who complete the trilogy will find that the three volumes together constitute something that none of them achieves individually: a full account of what it meant to survive the Holocaust, carry it, and try to make art from it in a political environment that preferred silence.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — The most formally demanding volume of Kertész’s trilogy and the one that makes the fullest argument about what testimony costs: a meta-fictional frame around Fatelessness that illuminates the original by showing the conditions under which it was written.