Fateless - Softcover

Imre Kert�sz

4.07

11,883 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099502526 ISBN 13: 9780099502524

Publisher: Vintage Books, 2006

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Fourteen-year-old Gyuri's father has been called up for labour service. Arriving at the family timber store he witnesses with nonchalance and boredom his father sign over the business to the firm's book-keeper. Two months later he finds himself assigned to a "permanent workplace" but within a fortnight he is unexpectedly pulled off a bus on his way to work and detained without explanation. This is the start of his journey to and subsequent imprisonment in Auschwitz. On his arrival Gyuri finds that he is unable to identify with other Jews, and in turn is rejected by them. An outsider among his own people, his estrangement makes him a preternaturally acute observer. "Fatelessness'" power lies in its refusal to mitigate the unfathomable alienness of the Holocaust and in the strength, and strangeness, of its narrative voice.

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From the Back Cover:

Fateless is a moving and disturbing novel about a Hungarian Jewish boy’s experiences in German concentration camps and his attempts to reconcile himself to those experiences after the war. Upon his return to his native Budapest still clad in his striped prison clothes, fourteen-year-old George Koves senses the indifference, even hostility, of people on the street. His former neighbors and friends urge him to put the ordeal out of his mind, while a sympathetic journalist refers to the camps as "the lowest circle of hell." The boy can relate to neither cliche and is left to ponder the meaning of his experience alone.
George's response to his experience is curiously ambivalent. In the camps he tries to adjust to his ever-worsening situation by imputing human motives to his inhumane captors. By imposing his logic - that of a bright, sensitive, though in many ways ordinary teenager - he maintains a precarious semblance of normalcy. Once freed, he must contend with the "banality of evil" to which he has become accustomed: when asked why he uses words like "naturally," "undeniably," and "without question" to describe the most horrendous of experiences, he responds, "In the concentration camp it was natural." Without emotional or spiritual ties to his Jewish heritage and rejected by his country, he ultimately comes to the conclusion that neither his Hungarianness nor his Jewishness was really at the heart of his fate: rather, there are only "given situations, and within these, further givens."

From the Inside Flap:

At the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn't particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, "You are no Jew." In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, Georg remains an outsider.
The genius of Imre Kertesz's unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the strangeness of its events, not least of which is Georg's dogmatic insistence on making sense of what he witnesses-or pretending that what he witnesses makes sense. Haunting, evocative, and all the more horrifying for its rigorous avoidance of sentiment, Fatelessness" is a masterpiece in the traditions of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski.

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