The Pathseeker

"The Pathseeker is a necessary addition to Mr. Kertesz's work in English, and should occasion thanks to both the novelist and his translator, Tim Wilkinson, who has rendered Mr. Kertesz's (famously difficult) Hungarian into a flowing, able English--as well as to Melville House's fascinating 'The Contemporary Art of the Novella' series, which rubric The Pathseeker falls under. . . . And with the introduction of The Pathseeker into English, after 30 years of silence, we should pay grateful and careful attention."--New York Sun

The new Contemporary Art of the Novella series launches with this stunning work from Nobel Prize-winner Imre Kertesz, author of Kaddish for an Unborn Child and Fatelessness. In a major work never before translated, the acclaimed Auschwitz survivor continues his blistering investigation of the methodologies of totalitarianism.

In a mysterious middle-European country, a relentless government detective slowly comes to suspect that he's under investigation himself--but for what and by whom? His banal travels become more and more tense and ominous as the examiner senses his own examination with a building sense of paranoia and powerlessness.

Stylish and unblinking, in a limpid translation by Tim Wilkinson, thishaunting tale transcends the genre it spoofs so mercilessly as Kertesz lays bare an emotional and psychological landscape ravaged by totalitarianism.

Imre Kertesz was born in Hungary in 1929 and, as a teenager, was imprisoned in Auschwitz by the Nazis. The author of numerous novels and stories, few of which have been translated into English, he won the Nobel Prize in 2002 for "writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history."

Tim Wilkinson has translated Kertesz's acclaimed Kaddish for an Unborn Child, Liquidation, and Fatelessness.