Imre Kertész

Christopher Wilson

Fateless

a novel

Fatelessness

Donald

It is unforgivable that Kertész remains relatively unknown despite winning a Nobel Prize. He is one of the great writers of the last century. While this book is not quite as chilling and masterful as Liquidation, it is amazing, especially the final quarter of the book.

I read this alongside Primo Levi's Auschwitz Report and Canetti's essay 'Power and Survival'.

Trevor Berrett

Fatelessness, previously translated as Fateless (but doesn’t Fatelessness have a more Nobel-worthy name?), is a first-person narrative account of Auschwitz and Buckenwald, told from the perspective of a fifteen-year-old Hungarian boy, Georg Koves. At first, he sounded as apathetic and cynical as Holden Caulfield. His father is getting sent to a labor camp, and he doesn’t show much emotion and seems to accept it as “natural.” In fact, he feels a bit awkward at his family’s display of sentiment. Even when Georg himself is taken from a bus and shipped on a train to Auschwitz he has more comments about seemingly petty irritations or puerile observations:

I didn’t even know offhand which way I was supposed to turn, and all I remember is that in the thick of it I felt a bit like laughing, in part out of astonishment and confusion, a sense of having been dropped slap in the middle of some crazy play in which I was not entirely acquainted with my role, in part because of a fleeting thought that just then flashed across my mind, which was my stepmother’s face when it finally dawned on her that it would be pointless to count on seeing me for supper this evening.

Mixed in were comments about how it really wasn’t that bad: the police were cordial, he didn’t have to go to work that day, etc. It is a very interesting way to approach a story about the Holocaust, but it still didn’t appeal to me — at first — it felt like cleverness just to be clever, just to be different.

Soon my attitude changed, though. Before I knew what was happening, the narrative shifted in a subtle, imperceptible way.

For my complete review, please visit my blog, The Mookse and the Gripes.

Fateless

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