The Union Jack - Imre Kertesz

In this haunting, never-before-translated autobiographical novella, an unnamed narrator recounts a simple anecdote, his sighting of the Union Jack during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 in the few days preceding the uprising's brutal repression by the Soviet army. In telling the story, he recalls his youthful self and the intellectual and spiritual epiphanies he experienced during this time. Filled with digressive meditations on the absurd order of chance, his story is ultimately that of a gradual awakening to a kind of radical subjectivity.