In the court of the bitter king

Fiction:Our hero is a disgruntled editor and his story is one of straightforward conventional disappointment with life - his life in particular. His name is Kingbitter, which in itself could be intended to suggest that his bitterness is large-scale. Or perhaps not, but anyway, Kingbitter and his fellow characters are far from happy.

So miserable are they that one of them, a writer who survived Auschwitz, decides to do something about it. It is this action and its consequences that dominate a layered narrative that becomes a play within a novel.

Hungarian Imre Kertész was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature, and on this dazzling little metaphysical conundrum of a novel - barely more than a novella - he was an inspired choice. In addition to Liquidation, a black comedy about existence and how some wayward individuals insist on thinking for themselves, he is also the author of Fatelessness, a disarmingly dispassionate account of a boy's experiences spanning a year of concentration camp hell. Except that he refuses to present it as a horror story; as he recalls saying to a journalist eager for his story, "I remarked that I had nothing at all to say about that, as I was not acquainted with hell and couldn't even imagine what that was like."

The horrors are there - the brutality, the humiliation, the foul food and the sensation of absolute hunger - yet he reports them in a detached, interested way in the role of a witness, never a victim. Kertész, who was born in Budapest in 1929 and was imprisoned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, is an original - there are no tears, no self-pity, no rhetoric, not even defiance. He favours laughter in the dark, albeit subtle irony that quietly encircles the reader's throat in silken gloves. You don't forget his books, they remain fixed in the imagination and the memory - and all without the slightest trace of polemic.

Fatelessness, which was first published in Hungary in 1975, and translated into English in 2004, is cool, almost intimidating and quite unlike anything else in Holocaust literature. More memoir than novel, it is presented as an adventure, not an indictment. Liquidation was published in Hungary three years ago and its English version has also been translated by Tim Wilkinson. It is as dauntingly impressive as Fatelessness, and shares that novel's chillingly laconic intelligence, yet it is quite different in form and looks to Beckett for its irony, ambivalence and heartbreaking playfulness:

Let us call our man, the hero of this story, Kingbitter. We imagine a man, and a name to go with him. Or conversely, let us imagine the name, and the man to go with it. Though this may all be avoided anyway since our man, the hero of this story, really is called Kingbitter.

The omniscient narrator, in an attempt to be helpful, but not too helpful, tries to set the scene, "in the early spring of, let us say, 1999, on a sunny morning at that - reality had become a problematic concept for Kingbitter, but, more serious still, a problematic state."

By page two the narrator is busily observing Kingbitter who is standing "as he frequently did nowadays" looking at the street below.

The muck-, oil-, and dog-dirt spattered sidewalk was lined with parked cars, and in the one-yard gaps between the cars and the leprotically peeling house walls the most mundane and ordinary passersby were attempting to go about their business, their hostile features an outward clue to their dark thoughts.

Aware that he has become obsessed with watching the down-and-outs, Kingbitter "suspected that some intelligible meaning lay hidden behind this curious passion of his". He even suspects that "if he were to succeed in deciphering that meaning, than he would also have a better understanding of his life." Meanwhile his laugh has become a "distinctive curt snort", and for him "the Hamlet question did not run "To be or not to be?" but "Am I or am I not?"

In the midst of his routine despair is the manuscript of a play, written by a dead friend. He has spent nine years wondering about having the play staged, and as the author's literary executor he is "now in the ninth year of considering whether he was handling the literary estate with due diligence". The dead author was a writer who had also worked in the publishing house. The narrative spins and shifts and the characters are interconnected and uniformly on the run from themselves. Kertész has drawn on the devices of European absurdist theatre, as perfected by Ionesco, for what is a high speed quasi-thriller rich in allusion and cross reference, not forgetting the Kafka-esque surrealism of post-communism.

At times Kingbitter, the personification of disenchanted modern confusion, takes over the narrative, and in a brilliant sequence recalls the morning B, the dead author, had decided enough was enough and, having summoned a romantic breakfast with his mistress, left a suicide note for her. "Forgive Me! Good Night!" Kingbitter describes the note as "the shortest farewell letter in literary history" before adding in one of the many wonderful afterthoughts that dance through the text: "I don't know why, but it now suddenly occurs to me that I did not take another look at the corpse, or, to be more precise, my deceased friend's face. Should I have? I don't know. I simply didn't think of it."

Late in the novel, Kingbitter, on the trail of a novel he believes B has also left behind him, is in conversation with his former lover Judit, who had been married to B. Kingbitter's exchanges with the exasperated Judit produce the kind of dialogue of which film-makers and actors dream.

Beckett's influence does preside quite magnificently and Kertész even quotes Molloy by way of setting up his wonderful maze of contradictions and allusion. And yet, he is a magician dependent on no master; this is inspired European fiction that articulates the doubts and frenzy of existence as well as the nightmare of memory.

Liquidation By Imre Kertész, translated by Tim Wilkinson Harvill Secker, 130pp. £12.99

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times