Thursday, October 10, 2002

Hungarian Jewish Author, Known for Accounts of Auschwitz, Wins Nobel in Literature By JENNIFER K. RUARK Imre Kertész won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature this morning. The Swedish Academy cited Mr. Kertész, a Hungarian Jew who survived Auschwitz, "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history." "In his writing Imre Kertész explores the possibility of continuing to live and think as an individual in an era in which the subjection of human beings to social forces has become increasingly complete," the academy said in a statement. "For him Auschwitz is not an exceptional occurrence that like an alien body subsists outside the normal history of Western Europe. It is the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern existence." Mr. Kertész was born in Budapest in 1929. He was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and from there to Buchenwald, where he was freed in 1945. He has largely supported himself as a writer and translator of German-language authors, including Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein, all of whom have influenced his work. "When I am thinking about a new novel, I always think of Auschwitz," Mr. Kertész has said. His first novel, released in English by Northwestern University Press in 1992 as Fateless, deals with a young boy, Köves, who survives a concentration camp by conforming. The boy takes the reality of the camp for granted, describing it without any moral indignation. "Kertész's message is that to live is to conform," writes the academy. "...Life and the human spirit are enemies." Fateless was followed by two novels that comment on the first. In Fiasco, an aging author's novel about Auschwitz is finally published, but all he can feel is emptiness. In Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1997), Mr. Kertész again returns to the subject of the concentration camp and presents love as the highest stage of conformism. Also significant among his works is a collection of fragments, Galley Diary (1992), in which Mr. Kertész conducts a dialogue with Pascal, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kafka, Camus, and Beckett. The academy describes Mr. Kertész's style as reflective of his refusal to compromise. His writing "is reminiscent of a thickset hawthorn hedge, dense and thorny for unsuspecting visitors. But he relieves his readers of the burden of compulsory emotions and inspires a singular freedom of thought." Each Nobel Prize is worth $1.08-million this year. The text of the Nobel announcement is available on the Nobel Foundation's World Wide Web site. Other news of 2002 Nobel Prizes: Nobel in Economics Goes to 2 Americans Who Brought Markets Into the Lab (10/9/2002) 3 Scientists Win Nobel in Chemistry for Developing Methods to Study Structure of Biological Molecules (10/9/2002) 3 Physicists Share Nobel Prize for Work on Cosmic Neutrinos and X-Rays (10/8/2002) Nobel Prize in Medicine Goes to 3 Scientists Who Study Cell Death (10/7/2002) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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