Against what, if nothing is resisting?
Imre Kertész: The Pathseeker
Like many of Kertész’s works, The Pathseeker is not about the trauma of the Holocaust itself so much as the trauma of survival. The self may survive but the triumph of that survival is chimerical.
Thomas Cooper23 June 2008
The Pathseeker, a slender novel or thick novella by Nobel Prize-winning author Imre Kertész, is the account of a concentration camp survivor who returns to the place where he had been held only to find himself unable to bear witness to or find catharsis from the injustices he suffered as a prisoner. First published in 1977 in Hungarian as Nyomkereso, it has now been brought out in English translation by Tim Wilkinson, translator of numerous works by Kertész, including the retranslation of his Nobel Prize work, Fatelessness. An experimental novel that adopts contrasting approaches to narration, The Pathseeker, like the rest of Kertész’s oeuvre, explores the experiences of having survived the Holocaust and the protagonist’s inability to find triumph in this survival.
