The Mookse and Gripes via Nobel Lareate Imre Kertesz's autobiographical novella, The Union Jack.

More and more, we find ourselves in awe of the depth and variety of places on the internet talking about books. Thus, we’ve decided to take a year-end look at how those places talked about our titles. (Read the kickoff.)The point is to feature not only the titles we proudly published in 2010, but also some of the great writing about those titles from around the internet. In some cases the writing may only mention our book. In these instances the posts would of course have to be extraordinary.

The road goes on and today we’re looking at The Union Jack by the Nobel Laureate, Imre Kertesz. This haunting autobiographical novella spreads from a single moment: the clearly remembered image of the Union Jack “the British Flag” during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Here’s more from our copy on the novella:

In the telling, partly a digressive meditation on “the absurd order of chance,” he recalls his youthful self, and the epiphanies of his intellectual and spiritual awakening,” an awakening to a kind of radical subjectivity. In his Nobel address Kertesz remembered:

“I, on a lovely spring day in 1955, suddenly came to the realization that there exists only one reality, and that is me, my own life, this fragile gift bestowed for an uncertain time, which had been seized, expropriated by alien forces, and circumscribed, marked up, brandedand which I had to take back from ‘History’, this dreadful Moloch, because it was mine and mine alone…”

Because of its digressive structure and meditative rigor, The Union Jack is a weighty read despite its slender profile. To critically assess the book is something not to be taken up casually. While it doesn’t take a student of Kertesz to read The Union Jack, it helps to have some familiarity with the Nobel Laureate’s work if you’re going to write critically about it.

Thus we arrive at The Mookse and Gripes. When a blogger opens a post with an anecdote about their wife buying them Kertesz for a birthday present you know they’re invested in the writer’s work. It is because of the autobiographical aspect of The Union Jack that the book becomes a sort of key for those interested in the great writer’s work.

Only someone versed in an author’s style can offer up observations like this:

This is an impossible book to summarize, but again it showcases one of the most intriguing aspects of Kertesz’s writing: the constant awareness of the arbitrariness of history, a theme I’ve been happy to find in my favorite Roth novels.  As in Kaddish for an Unborn Child, Liquidation, and particularly Fatelessness, though Kertesz is recounting history, there is a constant awareness of dumb luck.

This is followed by a representative quote of “dumb-luck” from The Union Jack:

I had become acquainted with my wife-to-be in the late summer the year before, just after she had got out of the internment camp where she had been imprisoned for a year for the usual reasons — that is to say, no reason at all.

The blog does sort of place the book in a category of being somewhat austere for an uninitiated reader, which we do not altogether agree with, but the overall assessment of and sincere love of the writer and his works lands The Mookse and Gripes as today’s stop on the blog tour.

If you want more about The Union Jack then there is also this visually spectacular piece over at Bookslut.

Up tomorrow: Eat When You Feel Sad by Zachary German.