Strangeness, the state of being a stranger, pervades the fiction of Imre Kertész. As a child and as a Jew in wartime Budapest, his early years were blighted by segregation, deportation, and liquidation. After the camps, there was socialism and the compulsion to conform. Authors faced the spectre of the censor; now, when travelling is possible, the isolation brought by writing in Hungarian is the obstacle. Helga Leiprecht travels to meet Imre Kertész in his native Budapest.
