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Title: Kaddish for a Child Not Born by Imre Kertesz, Katharina M. Wilson, Christopher C. Wilson ISBN: 0-8101-1161-6 Publisher: Hydra Books Pub. Date: 25 October, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.88 (8 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Powerful, dense, best read after "Fateless"
Comment: My four stars aren't meant to detract from this novella's favorable reviews. Rather, I'd like to suggest that readers tackle this work after they read "Fateless." There's allusions to this more accessible novel in the novella; the latter seems to me more the interest of a philosophically inclined reader's group. While "Fateless" can be read on one's own and grasped, I believe that "Kaddish" would be better suited for collective study and discussion.
It offers few of the pleasures of fiction. Rather, with its considerations of Adorno, Hegel, and Bernhard, and with its nods to the prose of Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and perhaps Kafka, it's more a meditation/fulmination than a novel with an easy plot trajectory. It offers food for thought, but may be rather indigestible if gulped in one sitting. This is more the type of work that Nobel laureates get rewarded for late in their careers; the popular acclaim granted "Fearless" by contrast would first gain an audience for this author, in my estimation.
Again, this is not to detract from Kertesz' achievement, but simply to point out that (at least in English), this compressed, concentrated message may better be shared if taken in smaller, diluted portions among like-minded friends. (My impression is that in the original Hungarian, the agglutinative nature of that language would make this an even heavier, more weighty lump of prose.) It would serve as a fitting challenge after you've all read and discussed "Fateless." As I suggest, this novel can be contemplated with profit by one's self; this smaller work is best divided, nibbled, and ruminated over bite by bitter bite.
Rating: 5
Summary: A letter to the child not meant to be
Comment: Definition: Kaddish -- A prayer recited in the daily synagogue services and by mourners after the death of a close relative.
In this novel, or more appropriately novella (it's less than 100 pages), the narrator, a failed writer and a holocaust survivor, writes what is ultimately a love letter to his unborn child, his child not born. He begins by reflecting on a night some time ago at a writer's retreat in Soviet-era Hungary when perhaps he first started pondering the context of his existence with one obsessive question in mind -- "my life in the context of the potentiality of your existence" with "your" referring to his unborn child. This is not a question the narrator necessarily wanted to address, but he had little choice as if being pulled by his unborn child, being "dragged. . . by this fragile little hand . . . down this path." What has led to this point in life where he will never see the "dark eyes" of his own little girl or the "gay and hard eyes like silver-blue gravel" of his own little boy.
This is not a nice, linear narrative. Instead we enter a dense story full of stream-of-consciousness with all of the narrator's philosophies, emotions, obsessions, fears and contradictions. We learn about his failed writing career, his school experiences, his relationship with his father and, most importantly, his relationship with his wife (now his ex-wife), the backbone of the narrative. Of interest to note, the author's concentration camp is never addressed in detail but is only referred to indirectly. The effect is intensifying as the holocaust becomes an evil lurking in the darkness, driving the narrator in ways only partially observable.
Ultimately, the narrator evolves his obsessive question from questioning his existence the context of his unborn child's potentiality to "your nonexistence in the context of the necessary and fundamental liquidation of my existence." And while his wife has her theories on what is going on with the narrator's retreat into darkness, the narrator can only leave us with the facts as they are and the conclusion there is an inscrutable survival instinct in us that drives us to survive even when we want to die. And the results of our survival instincts can make for a messy life, including the inward retreating, the severed relationships and, in this case, a divorce and a child not to be..
And then the heart-breaking realization may come to the reader of all that could be in our world. But in the end, sometimes we need to say Kaddish for both our children who die and our children never meant to be.
Rating: 5
Summary: Honest Reverie
Comment: This book feels like a hundred-page sentence although there is punctuation and even a few paragraph breaks. It has to be read carefully as it is poetry and philosophy combined. While it has no plot in the normal sense, it beckons you into its world. It is a monologue delivered by a lonely, aging writer who is wrestling with the ghost of his failed marriage and with his secular Jewish identity years after the Holocaust. The monologue has a comic edge: the whining repetition about how a woman left long ago makes the reader feel slightly superior. But the narrator's repeated gripes are ultimately not intended to make him seem childish; they show us how we cling to the past and to other people when confronted with the terrifying, unfathomable realities of racism and loss.
No philosophical truths are uncovered. Rather, philosophical power is unleashed through the exploitation of contradiction, like the splitting of the atom. Do I exist? Does that mean anything? A negative answer inspires emotion. Emotion implies that we must exist and that this must have meaning. Death and life, hope and fear, sex and loneliness, race and assimilation are juxtaposed. The narrator reaches for the pairs with two arms outstretched. The philosophical effect of these contradictions lies in the poetry.
"No" is the first word of the book. Structurally, poetically, the book revolves around the spoken "no" more than it does around the narrator's decision not to have children. He lives in his "no." The "no" is his suicide. All other words are as a continuous breath that supports the "no" that frames the narrative. And, after this hundred-page sentence, we are left with the impression of a vast silence.
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Title: Fateless by Imre Kertesz, Christopher Wilson, Katharina Wilson ISBN: 0810110490 Publisher: Hydra Books Pub. Date: 21 October, 1996 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul ISBN: 0375707166 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 13 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian ISBN: 0060936231 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 23 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee ISBN: 0140296409 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 31 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945 by Wladyslaw Szpilman ISBN: 0312311354 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 20 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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