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 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 translation by Tim Wilkinson, this tale lays bare an emotional and psychological landscape ravaged by totalitarianism in one of Kertesz's examinations of the responsibilities born of the Holocaust.

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Weiterführende Informationen

• Leseprobe

Personen: Kertesz, Imre Wilkinson, Tim