Free Fiasco by Imre Kertész

manuscript has been assessed by our firm’s readers. On the basis of their unanimous opinion we are unable to undertake publication of your novel.
    We consider that your way of giving artistic expression to the material of your experiences does not come off, whereas the subject itself is horrific and shocking. The fact that it nevertheless fails to become a shattering experience for the reader hinges primarily to the main protagonist’s, to put it mildly, odd reactions. While we find it understandable that the adolescent main protagonist does not immediately grasp what is happening around him (the call-up for forced labour, compulsory wearing of the yellow star, etc.), we think it inexplicable why, on arrival at the concentration camp, he sees the bald-shaven prisoners as “suspect.” More passages in bad taste follow: “Their faces did not exactly inspire confidence either: jug ears, prominent noses, sunken, beady eyes with a crafty gleam. Quite like Jews in every respect.”
    It is also incredible that the spectacle of the crematoria arouses in him feelings of “a sense of a certain joke, a kind of student jape,” as he knows he is in an extermination camp and his being a Jew is sufficient reason forhim to be killed. His behaviour, his gauche comments repel and offend the reader, who can only be annoyed on reading the novel’s ending, since the behaviour the main protagonist has displayed hitherto, his lack of compassion, gives him no ground to dispense moral judgements, call others to account (e.g. the reproaches he makes to the Jewish family living in the same building). We must also say something about the style. For the most part your sentences are clumsy, couched in a tortuous form, and sadly there are all too many phrases like “… on the whole …,” “naturally enough,” and “besides which …”
    We are therefore returning the manuscript to you.
    Regards.
    … The letter at least granted me a morning charged with emotions; I recall it even today with a certain sense of nostalgia. If I was surprised, it was no more than the way a person is surprised to bang his head on a protrusion in the wall he had long ago noticed was too low, and he would undoubtedly bang his head on it sooner or later. At least I would encounter a certain amount of passion and perspicacity, albeit only the perspicacity of anger and injustice—at any rate sentiments and senses worthy of the subject!
    Then, as I recall, I was exceedingly amused, for instance, by the gesture, that self-assured, firm dismissive wave of the hand, with which the purpose of an endeavour I had undertaken, for motives which were problematic, and far from clear even to myself, was being expropriated, so to speak, only to be immediately destroyed; because the letter presumed, if I was following it correctly, that my sole reason for writing the novel was for it to end up in a publisher’s office where decisions are taken about these sorts of commodities. The comic aspect of this absurd loss of proportions wasenough to set even my diaphragm aquiver. For I could not deny it, in the end I had taken my novel to the publisher. But that had been intended purely as a temporary resting place in a whole chain of events, which since then had already been overhauled by time and further events occurring within that time—such as this letter that had been delivered to me. “And so?” I ask myself, “Does that somehow obliterate what I have accomplished?” On the contrary, it has set a seal on it, because—and this fundamental factor had not escaped my watchful eye—that dismissive motion is, at one and the same time, also the first real, one might say, authentic proof that my novel actually exists. Yes, I may have told myself, the unstructured time which now lies behind me has gained its definite outlines precisely in the light of this letter; until now I have never seen my situation so simply—as one that, in point of fact, can be summarized in a single