The acclaimed Hungarian Holocaust survivor Imre Kertesz continues his investigation of the malignant methodologies of totalitarianism in a major work of fiction.In a mysterious middle-European country, a man identified only as "the commissioner" undertakes what seems to be a banal trip to a nondescript town with his wife-a brief detour on the way to a holiday at the seaside-that turns into something ominous. Something terrible has happened in the town, something that no one wants to discuss. With his wife watching on fearfully, he commences a perverse investigation, rudely interrogating the locals, inspecting a local landmark with a frightening intensity, traveling to an outlying factory where he confronts the proprietors ... and slowly revealing a past he's been trying to suppress.In a limpid translation by Tim Wilkinson, this haunting tale lays bare an emotional and psychological landscape ravaged by totalitarianism in one of Kertesz's most devastating examinations of the responsibilities of and for the Holocaust.

Author Biography

IMRE KERT SZ was born in 1929 in Budapest. As a youth, he was imprisoned first in Auschwitz and later in Buchenwald. He worked as a journalist and playwright before publishing FATELESSNESS, his first novel, in 1975. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002.