Los Angeles Times // The Pathseeker by Imre Kertész
My review of the newly translated Imre Kertész novella appears in today’s LA Times.
It’s amazing what a Nobel Prize will do for an author’s career. Imre Kertész’s profound and puzzling novella, “The Pathseeker,” has finally arrived in English, 30 years after its initial publication in Hungary. In it, a man known only as “the commissioner” travels, along with his wife, to some unnamed Mitteleuropa seaside resort. He decides to take a detour along the way to make some inquiries about an old, unresolved case that involved “the part of universal evil that falls to our lot.” Or, it’s equally possible that the detour was the point of the vacation all along.