Resumen de "So Terribly Opaque": Salvaging Memory in Three Hungarian Books about World War II
The three books discussed in this essay – Imre Kertész's Fatelessness, Teréz Rudnóy's Women Getting Free, and the wartime diary of Fanni Gyarmati, wife of Miklós Radnóti – all had to be salvaged from oblivion: they were suppressed, forgotten, or discovered a long time after they had been written. In this essay I will argue that, besides other factors, the reason for their mixed reception is partly related to the fact that they salvage memories that are hard to incorporate into cultural memory, ritualized by historiography and politics. I will also focus on how reading literary texts and diaries with a view to how they represent cultural memory may serve as an antidote to collective amnesia, by salvaging and bringing into play a variety of personal experiences – individual and collective – and fostering multidirectional memory.
