A Fugue of Death

Kaddish for a Child Not Born
by Imre Kertész; translated by Christopher C. and Katharina M. Wilson
Evanston, Illinois: HydraBooks/Northwestern University Press, 2002
(95 pages; $14.95, paperback)

reviewed by Graeme Hunter

The narrator of this slim, powerful novella, identified only as B, is a writer born into a Jewish family in Budapest and snatched from thence into Auschwitz. There the terrible ovens transform the meaning of his life (and every life) into smoke. Without ever departing from the first person, B nevertheless calls forth a polyphony of other voices in this piecemeal retrospective of a life constructed around a negation of life.

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Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).

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