Coming Home

23.IV.24

For the past few years, I have been participating at irregular intervals in a TV program. This time, the discussion is about »homecoming novels.«

If you were to write a homecoming novel: To which place would you have returned, and from what perspective would the narrative be told?

Over the years, I have discovered that I want to step out of my own skin when I write. Of course, that is not possible, yet it remains the goal. Personal experiences in my books are not a walking frame but a trampoline. So a homecoming novel, by moi? Not likely.

The fact is, however, that a few years ago I began writing something that’s been sitting around on my computer and might still be tweaked. As a six-year-old, I ran away from home. At the time, we lived in the countryside in southern Sweden. One afternoon, my mother was going to pick up my father in the nearest town. I wanted to go along, but since I refused to put on the white parka that I hated, she told me to stay home. Boiling with rage over the injustice, I packed a loaf of bread, my sweater, and a roll of toilet paper into my backpack, then set off. I had 3.25 in my pocket, which I suspected would not be enough for the ticket to my grandmother in Vienna, where I planned to go, though somehow I was convinced it would work out. A few kilometers outside the village, I left the country road, crossed a field, and rested by some trees. When I saw our olive-green Ford Zodiac on its way home, I decided to sneak back into the village and, hidden behind the hay bales on the slope above our house, spy on my parents’ panic over their eldest son having vanished into thin air.

The novel I was planning was meant to be a fantasy biography. What would have happened if I had not gone back? What would the six-year-old have experienced if he had departed from his familiar life? Who would he have become? With a few tweaks, a »homecoming« version could be about how this fictional »I« returns to a life he had interrupted nearly sixty years earlier. In this way, the book would not be about reconciliation, in its more or less complicated from, but about how literature is needed to understand where a person comes from – even if that might be at the expense of the truth.

Which homecoming novel would you recommend – and why that one in particular?

There are many homecoming novels following The Odyssey, which is, of course, the archetype of our tradition, but few seem to me as moving as Imre Kertész’s Fateless. The book depicts how the fourteen-year-old child of a divorced couple, György Köves, is stopped one day by the police, put on a bus, and eventually ends up in Auschwitz. Primarily, the novel is a depiction of the camp, but since Köves can recount everything he experiences, the reader knows from the start that he will survive. Hidden within the account of deportation lies a homecoming novel.

Köves experiences the extermination camps with clear-eyed matter-of-factness. In Auschwitz, »people are usually very changed.« Nothing surprises him; the tone remains as naively sober as it is free from the pathos of outrage, which is one of the text’s great merits. After some time, the young narrator, who upon arrival instinctively lied about his age and thus escaped death, is transferred to Buchenwald, and later to Seitz. Health deteriorating, he ends up in the infirmary, and is saved when the camp is finally liberated. In the final chapter, he embarks on the journey home to Budapest, where, according to the camp elder, he is expected to »resume [his] life.« But how does one resume a life that has been stripped of all its defining attributes? How does one »return home« to a world one was never meant to see again?

Köves takes the tram for the final leg of the journey. He does not have money for the ticket, so a stranger pays for him. When the man asks where he is from, he tells him the truth. When the man asks what he feels, he explains: »Hate.« The man tries to rationalize the answer, but deep down, Köves senses: »[I] began to realize that there were apparently certain things we could never discuss with strangers, with people who were ignorant, in a certain sense children.« He, who is himself a child but who, during his time in the camps, has become a hundred times older than the man, understands that it is impossible to share what he has been through with people who have never been deported. Sitting on a bench in a square, Köves thus experiences »homesickness« for Auschwitz. He realizes that the hardest part is not surviving the camps; the hardest part is no longer belonging to those who never returned. He cannot begin a new life but only continue his old one – which, however, ended in the camps: »I shall continue my uncontinuable life.« A novel of homecoming? Yes, but only if by »home« we mean everything it is considered not to be.

Kertész was careful to note that Fateless was not an autobiography. In one of his last books, Dossier K, which is as much a self-examination as it is a record of his own writing, he points out, however, that in the novel he »managed to slip out of my own skin … without betraying my own experiences.« There you have it: literature not as a self-aggrandizing homecoming, but as an independent form of life in otherness.

If you were to name the three most important ingredients in a good homecoming novel, what would they be?

Without change, it will not work. Instead of reconciliation, I would wish for clarity. And as a bonus, an affirmation of otherness would be welcome.In the taxi home after the broadcast, I wonder why I had not managed to answer the questions with more edge.

It was not until a few weeks later, on my way to a session at the city’s cleverest used bookstore, that I realized what I should have said. When I spotted the box set that had just been released in the large display window, I understood that, for me, »returning home« can only be to books that were once written in order to leave.