The Union Jack

"This is one of the most beautiful short novels, or novellas, ever written. And only one thing ever happens: Kertész’s narrator looks out a window and sees a jeep go by flying the Union Jack. That’s it. But just the sight of this flag, and the context of the sighting, reminds Kertész that there’s an outside world: a world beyond Hungary, a world of freedom. He was one of the few, the very few, great writers who came through the Nazi death camps who wrote beyond the camps: who transposed the camps onto other structures. He once wrote that he was happiest in the camps, and he wasn’t being perverse, or he wasn’t only being perverse. What he meant was that, as a child in Hungary, all he knew were the camps, and so the rare moments that was able to sit in a field or have a fleeting conversation with a friend, became exceptionally joyous, exceptionally precious. We all become inured to the world in which we’re raised: this was Kertész’s point. The monstrous can come to seem, and too often does come to seem, the natural."