For a short novella, with little in the way of obvious plot, The Union Jack is an immensely dense, challenging and convoluted text. The very personal narration, acquiescing to prompting from friends, sets out to tell the story of his one and only encounter with the Union Jack, which he saw, for a few moments during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, hanging from the window of a passing British jeep. Digressions keep taking him in tangential directions though, and so the reader finally gets the story only in the last few pages, a story that in itself doesn't seem all that captivating. The real story, of course, emerges from the constant digressions, recounting occasional heightened moments – such as discovering the music of Wagner and the books of Thomas Mann – that, taken in total, help make sense of the better part of an entire life lived under a totalitarian regime.Kertesz is a supreme stylist, but demands the reader's closest concentration. His long, winding sentences bristle with striking images and are often – physically and emotionally – breathtaking, and his control of language is extraordinary. The Union Jack is a book that feels slight and yet somehow also immense, and finishing left me with a real sense that I probably need to take another pass at it in order to more fully mine it of its worth.
