"Given that just three of the novels, a couple of the shorter fiction pieces and a few extracts from the two journal-type works are accessible in English translation, which certainly impedes appraisal of Kertész's approach, readers reliant on that language are hardly in a position to appreciate that there are several strands that run through all the writing. Impressive continuities are traceable over the last thirty years or more. In particular that Kertész's theme or 'message' is of much wider relevance than the ghetto of ’Holocaust’ literature to which, in view of the non-accessibility of important parts of the whole oeuvre, it has been all too easy to assign him. Apart from anything else, I would like to set Kertész in the mainstream of literature – and not just Hungarian literature, but (obviously, in translation) European, American, and indeed universal literature – where he truly belongs and which, moreover, shows why he was a well-merited recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002.”
"It is very tempting to follow the Beckett lead, since there is no doubt that Kertész finds the Beckettian world-picture and mordant sense of humour very congenial. Kertész has elsewhere certainly acknowledged that influence, as well as those of a very eclectic mix of authors, including Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Thomas Bernhard, but possibly no writer has been so consistently drawn on for inspiration down the decades as the 1957 Nobel Laureate, Albert Camus."
”The Pathseeker can be read as a commentary on, or companion piece to, Fatelessness. But the commissioner is not Kertész the self-examining writer reflecting on the creation of Fatelessness, any more than Köves is Kertész the 14-year-old taken to Auschwitz. To elide those gaps is to deny the novel's freedom and form; subjects that fascinate all novelists to a certain extent, but Kertész more profoundly than most.” ”In explaining something of the weight and importance of Kertész's subjects and creative achievements, it is hard to convey simultaneously the deftness and vivacity of his writing: his sheer joy in making something new with words. Tim Wilkinson must be deeply responsive to Kertész's delight in language to convey it so pervasively in his translations. There is something quintessentially youthful and life-affirming in this writer's sensibility – like Gyuri Köves, arriving in Auschwitz and noticing a football pitch: ’Green turf, the requisite white goalposts, the chalked lines of the field of play--it was all there, inviting, fresh, pristine, in perfect order. This was latched onto straightaway by the boys as well: Look here! A place for us to play soccer after work.’ (…) [F]iction is not just a repository for the small details that other kinds of narrative leave aside. It also preserves the life-affirming hope that, even in Auschwitz, flushed the heart of one boy with joy.” Ruth Scurr, The Nation”Mr. Kertész’s prose, recursive and long-breathed, keeps pace with the circular, frustrated action of the plot. Anonymity, elliptical speech, a fluid, almost euphuistic beauty, and an obdurate refusal on Mr. Kertész’s part to concede to even the most usual desires of the reader: The Pathseeker might seem, in a summary treatment, like the colorless, belabored works produced by writers whose sole aim is to toy with narrative convention. But Mr. Kertész places its maddening, permanent, and eerie periphrasis in the highest possible service: moral witness. And precisely because Mr. Kertész refuses to speak with full openness about the scenery, its history, and his protagonist’s deep and damaging relation to both, The Pathseeker avoids even the slightest tendency toward ethical didacticism, a great risk when writing about the Holocaust.” ”The gappy, inescapable memory of an administrative building in the summer noon, with its limp flag, a building hidden or demolished by humans, time, or the protagonist’s own faulty recollections — this dredging-up, imperfect though it may be, stands as Mr. Kertész’s protest against silence, historical and otherwise. And with the introduction of The Pathseeker into English, after 30 years of silence, we should pay grateful and careful attention.” ”The Pathseeker is far from a one-note story, and what is perhaps most remarkable about it are the shifts in tone. It is, ultimately, a truly experimental novel, a writer still working out what might work best, unable to settle on one particular style or literary approach to his subject matter. It's all the more striking because a lot of the workmanship still shows in the sentences, Kertész's effort to get it precisely right (and his decisions as to what to leave out...) just a bit too apparent.” ”…the commissioner is not so much an alter ego of Kertész but rather the instrument Kertész tries to use to try to approach this subject-matter. (…) The Pathseeker is a book of seeking out traces, of trying -- to put it far too simply -- to come to terms with an unspeakable past. It also feels very much like an early attempt by an author to approach the subject-matter. Kertész leaves a great deal unsaid and unspecified, as if even the mention of words such as 'Buchenwald' or 'concentration camp' would have touched too raw a nerve. The elliptical approach works quite well here, but familiarity with the subject-matter (and with Kertész's life and oeuvre) is helpful.” ”Most tellingly, The Pathseeker invokes The Pathfinder of James Fenimore Cooper, casting the commissioner cum Natty Bumppo as not the Last of the Mohicans but the Last of the Shoah’s Survivors: Just as Natty had one leather-stockinged moccasin in the world of the indigenous Indian and the other in the world of the settler or usurping white, the commissioner’s identity is European only if he’s not a Jew, or martyr. Both Cooper’s Bumppo and Kertész’s commissioner have set out — one through the American wilds, the other through the redressed borders of Europe — to solve the most essential and insoluble of mysteries: that of the self that not only survives but also triumphs.” Previously on HLO Kertész's Detective Story in English: from the reviews Imre Kertész: The Pathseeker Melville House, 2008 Translated by Tim Wilkinson | 
