In a brief interview given shortly after winning the Nobel in 2002, the Hungarian Imre Kertész, asked to comment on his claim that it was easier for him to write in a dictatorship than a democracy, replied: "In a democracy you have to find a market niche, make sure a novel is 'interesting' and 'spectacular'. That may be the toughest censorship of all." Writing without hope of publication, he said, gave him the freedom "to go as deep inside as I wanted".

Kaddish for an Unborn Child may have been published in the year after the collapse of communism, but there is no sense that Kertész has found it difficult to go deep inside himself. This is a lacerating book, a work of great self-laceration in fact, as is usual with Kertész's work, which is strongly autobiographical, and revolves around the problem of the concentration camps.

The first noticeable aspect of Kaddish is its style, which is so highly indebted to Thomas Bernhard's that the matter of plagiarism can be discounted  and the debt is explicitly acknowledged, anyway. Bernhard's is a very infectious style, it is true (Tim Parks fruitfully suffered from this infection for a while), but it is one that is supremely adapted to evoking and expressing inner turmoil, mania and suicidal depression, while  amazingly  allowing room for comedy, albeit of a rather black nature, an über-kvetching in which the whole universe, every conceivable state of affairs, can be denounced. "I long ago stopped trying to live as it were in harmony with other people, with Nature, or even with myself, and what is more, I would see that as nothing short of a form of moral poverty, the same sort of disgusting perversity as in an oedipal relationship or incest between two hideous siblings." The sentence this comes from is nearly six times longer, but that is all part of the fun. The extract gives you a flavour, and note the rhetorical throat-clearing of "as it were", the progression of impossibilities (other people, nature, himself) the audacious proposal that harmony with oneself is morally impoverished, and you begin to get the idea; you also get the idea that Tim Wilkinson is a seriously good translator. Kertész is a master of the hideous, thought-provoking inversion, which in his case was provoked, as this book reveals, by the odd acts of unbelievable kindness which assured his survival of the Holocaust: "What is truly irrational and genuinely inexplicable is not evil but, on the contrary, good."

The word that sounds throughout the book is "No!", which is the narrator's reply to (a) the question he is asked, whether he has any children, and (b) the suggestion, made by his wife many years earlier, that they have a child together. You may already suspect, in broad detail, the reasons why the narrator should so vehemently refuse to be a father, but the particular reasons, revealed towards the end of this short but punishing book, are astonishing, even if you have by then become prepared for being astonished. (Another thing the Bernhard style is good for is the mimicking of burgeoning hysteria, so by the end of the narrative you feel you have somehow made your home in a whirlwind.)

So, this is a book about non-existence, then, as much as it is about persistent existence. That Kertész has made it to his 80th year is worthy of remark; or perhaps it is only, as his narrator puts it here, "a piece of good luck only slightly more astounding than the accustomed bad luck". Bernhard wrote a book called Yes which is about suicide; this book could just as easily have been called No; in fact we are more or less invited to think of this as its title, or subtitle. But "Kaddish" as applied here has its own irony, blacker than night: the prayer is actually a praise of God, and does not mention death at all.

I may have given the impression that this is harrowing, and it is; but it has its moments of great, consoling insight, is about far more than just the Holocaust and in its own haunting way provides comfort for the afflicted, for anyone who has ever thought, if only for a moment, with Calderón, that "Man's greatest crime is to be born."