Kaddish For An Unborn Child (2004)

Do You like book Kaddish For An Unborn Child (2004)?

There were parts, formally and tonally, that reminded me of Ponge's Soap and Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground. However, the prose in Kaddish feels far less intentional or purposeful than either of those texts it is resembling. While I understand and appreciate what this book is trying to accomplish -- a painfully honest psychological portrait of its author through unmediated stream of consciousness -- for me it falls short aesthetically. The formal structure it seems to be following in the beginning pages -- a constant repetition of a story that builds itself more with each iteration -- is very interesting, but falls apart half way through the text upon which the narrative becomes dense psychobabble, to put it bluntly. This books requires a bit of patience and an enjoyment of unceasing rambling prose, neither of which I possess in great quantity.
—Hanna

El libro empieza con un ¡NO!. Después, desmenuza las preocupaciones del personaje principal: B, un autor y traductor que tiene pequeños tintes autobiográficos de Kértesz. La novela, después, a la manera de un ensayo, habla del entorno, vivencias y cuestiones personales desarrolladas. Cómo los judíos se asumen, qué hace él como escritor, porqué el mal tiene una explicación y el bien no tiene lógica y así. Sin embargo, también se cuenta una historia. Él, su vida, su ex-esposa, los hijos que no llegaron porque él no quiso asumir ese papel de autoridad, no quiso tener un hijo, de alguna forma porque su libertad no era libertad y era una trampa. Como sucede todo en la mente del personaje, el punto de vista es de él sobre las cosas, pero a veces resulta ambiguo por todos los elementos narrativos que maneja. Me llegó mucho en lo personal porque habla sobre lo que más duele al escribir, la vida que dejamos, los impulsos destructivos con los que tenemos que vivir y que son parte del trabajo. "...tocad más sombriamente los violines / luego subiréis como humo en el aire / luego tendréis una fosa en las nubes / allí no hay estrechez”. Todos los escritores cavamos nuestra tumba en las nubes, o al menos deberíamos hacerlo, intentarlo cada vez. La novela, por supuesto, como todo lo que he leído de Kértesz hasta el momento, es impecable. El nobel lo ganó a pulso y bien
—Mariana Orantes

a great and dark autobiographical book, speaking impossible truths with brazen and an often almost obscene courage... a courage so courageous it becomes obscene.echoing bernhard -- whom kertesz has translated -- this is a great monologue of negation and destruction, which nonetheless (hopelessly) creates. speaking about the one thing that saved him ("albeit it saved me for the sake of destruction"), i.e. his work, kertesz writes, "In those years I recognized my life for what it was: as a fact on the one hand and as a spiritual form on the other, or, more precisely, the spiritual form of the survival instinct that no longer can survive, doesn't want to survive, and probably is no longer capable of survival, but one that still and because of it all demands its own, that is to say, its own formation like a rounded glass-hard object so that it could continue to exist, no matter why, no matter for whom--for everyone and no one..." (94).also, to mention: some reviews i read somewhere favored the wilkinson translation over the wilson's. because of this i picked up both to compare (after starting with the wilson's)... even if kertesz himself seems to prefer the wilkinson (perhaps because this more recent, post nobel-winning translation is being done by a larger house), the wilson's was to me the far better translation, much more readable, and one that seemed to capture the book's bravura and darkness and humor with much more panache. of course i don't speak hungarian so maybe i'm wrong, but a little research has at least this agreeing opinion: from www.forward.com/articles/13167/Kertész’s early novels exist in two English translations: Tim Wilkinson, a British expatriate in Budapest and translator of both fictions under review, retranslated two books for Knopf that had earlier been translated by Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson and published by Northwestern University Press in the days before the author’s laureate and fame. Kertész himself is said to approve of Wilkinson’s translations, or at least to disapprove of the Wilsons’, telling The Journal News: “I really tried to protest against the first translations, but I found complete rejection. The publisher was not willing to do new translations. It was a really bad feeling. It was as if you had a very sane character who has a rendezvous with the reader and the person who shows up is basically a real jerk, with a stammer, bad breath and a foul mouth.”Ladies and gentlemen of the jury of those of us who care about translation — this is a case of an author having to be saved from himself, or from his enthusiasm at being retranslated, at interest being breathed anew into his work. “Fateless” by the Wilsons is every word as effective as Wilkinson’s “Fatelessness,” and “Kaddish” I would reread in the Northwestern translation (titled “Kaddish for a Child Not Born”), which called upon the example of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard — an unavoidable influence, whom Kertész has translated — without burying the text in received style or homage.While the Wilsons are guilty of egregious sins of omission, they served their Muir roles with selflessness (husband and wife Edwin and Willa Muir being the first, though flawed, translators of Kafka), having Englished an uncompromising writer of inaccessible Europe relatively early and well. As for Wilkinson, one does not know what poetry Kertész reads into his prose. If Wilkinson is a good translator, he’s a middling writer. He knows Hungarian, he must, but he hasn’t much art in his native English, which is paramount for a prose as spare as Kertész’s, in which every word, every comma, counts.from www.forward.com/articles/13167/
—Eugene