LAST IMPRESSIONS

• From the award-winning author of Gratitude and The Afterlife of Stars, Last Impressions is a masterful novel; elegant, humane, and deeply affecting.

When Ben Beck, happily married Toronto university professor and father of two well-launched daughters, realizes he has only so much time left with his volatile, enigmatic widower father Zoltan, he sets out to discover the truth about a few mysteries that he has never been quite sure he wanted to investigate. There is a brief letter from Hungary containing a lock of hair, signed only with initials, kept by Zoltan who otherwise threw away or destroyed everything from the past, especially from his past in Hungary before he came to Canada in the 1950s. There is the fact that Zoltan had a brother, Bela, the golden boy of 1930s Budapest, athletic, talented, and intellectual, whose fate has never been shared with the next generations of the Beck family. And finally there is a tiny handmade notebook filled with minuscule writing, some of it poetry dedicated to a woman named Zsofia.

Ben's quest to better understand his larger-than-life father, a man both intensely present and impenetrably distant, and sometimes unfathomably selfish, is warmly funny and life-affirming even as it explores the inevitable loss that love entails. In the course of this present story, we learn, as Ben does, how two accomplished sons of a Jewish professional family in 1930s Budapest were interned in a labour camp where death from overwork, abuse, and disease was all around, and how they escaped in the chaos of the Russian invasion of the winter of 1944-45. We learn why Zoltan was the only one of the brothers to reunite with his parents, and ultimately escape Communist Hungary to bring his young family to Canada. And we learn the truth of that tragic loss even as we experience with Ben and Zoltan a joyous and healing revelation of enduring love and vibrant life.


JOSEPH KERTES was born in Hungary but escaped with his family to Canada after the revolution of 1956. His first novel, Winter Tulips, won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour. His third novel, Gratitude, won a Canadian Jewish Book Award and the U.S. National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, and his fourth, The Afterlife of Stars, garnered extraordinary critical acclaim. Kertes founded Humber College's distinguished creative writing and comedy programs, and well known and beloved within the Canadian literary community, many of whose members have benefitted from his support over the years.