Fatelessness
A boy in the camps with no framework to put it in, reporting it exactly as it arrives.
The Hungarian writer is an expert at understatement and at shocking us with the candour of his observations.
A novel narrated by Gyorgy Koves, a fifteen-year-old from Budapest deported first to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald, who reports what happens to him in the flat, literal register of someone recording each moment as it lands. He notices the selections, the roll calls, the slow starvation, and he processes them not as atrocity but as a sequence of conditions to be met, each one following reasonably from the last. The reader watches a mind normalise the unbearable one small step at a time.
For a clinician, the value lies in how precisely Kertesz shows adaptation and dissociation operating in extremity: the way attention narrows to the immediate task, the way horror is registered without the affect that should accompany it, and the strange calm this produces. The closing chapters press on the distance between what a person lived and the meanings others later hand him. Kertesz drew on his own deportation as a teenager. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002.
About the author
Imre Kertész
Imre Kertesz (1929 to 2016) was a Hungarian writer. Born in Budapest, he was deported at the age of fourteen to Auschwitz and later to Buchenwald, where he survived until liberation in 1945. He drew on that experience in his fiction, most notably in the novel Fatelessness, which follows a teenage boy through the camps. In 2002 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He continued to write essays and novels in Hungarian, and he died in Budapest.
Details
- 1975
- Hungarian
- Vintage
- Vintage
- 272
- 9781400078639