"L'ultimo rifugio" è lo sguardo che un grande testimone del XX secolo rivolge alla propria vita, legata a doppio filo alle svolte drammatiche della storia.(fonte: Google Books)

Kertész calls this a ‘diary-novel’: neither purely one nor the other but a mixture of both. He describes his life in the last 10 years or so: how it is effected by what he calls a ”Glückskatastrophe”: receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002, and he ruthlessly observes his decline towards old age and the ante-chamber of death.

What I remember a couple of months after reading it: above all his constant complaint that, following the reception of the Nobel Literature prize, the engagements leave him little time for writing. He himself says that readers must be bored by his complaints; and he is right, it is boring to read this again and again! I also remember his political views regarding Israel: although he states that he is at times ‘irritated’ by its politics, his attitude amounts nevertheless to: ‘my country, right or wrong’. He calls Barenboim’s political actions – who, in my view, has a much more healthy attitude towards Israel – him ‘fighting windmills’. All governments of all countries need to be watched – the more powerful the more necessary – and their acknowledged and hidden agendas constantly criticized as practically all governments represent a self-serving economic-political oligarchy, in particular those who brandish their ‘democratic’ credentials. It seems that his fate, surviving Auschwitz, does not give him the choice to see that the boundaries do not lie between one people and another, between one country and other countries but between the centre and the periphery, those who hold the power and the excluded.

But I kept reading. Why? What kept me? His search for the relevant life threatened by ‘daily banalities’? :– how familiar! His painful documentation of his physical decline? His constant search and questioning of himself? His perspicacious answer to the question how one becomes a writer? (302): ‘When one’s head is crowded by sentences, which, once written down, do not resemble those imagined; so one starts the work, the fight for the right expression.’! And: The idea, he says, guiding his own writing: the ironic novel, disguised as autobiography, which opposes not only the usual concentration camp literature so well known that it induces boredom, but literature generally (124). Images of the human that come to him when stuck in a crowd: brutality, cowardice, maliciousness (49). The fecundity of distance, that 'belonging-nowhere' provides the space for creativity where he feels truly at home (122) :- how true, etc. (VII / VIII-15) ( )