A haunting, never-before-translated, autobiographical novella by the 2002 Nobel Prize winner.
An unnamed narrator recounts a simple anecdote, his sighting of the Union Jack — the British Flag — during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, in the few days preceding the uprising’s brutal repression by the Soviet army. 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 Kertész remembered:
