A review by sidharthvardhan
Fatelessness by Imre Kertész

5.0

"even in Auschwitz, it seems, it is possible to be bored—assuming one is privileged."

IK was in concentration camp himself for a year at an age of around 15 and this novel is semi-autobiographical. Instead of usual double-quotation marks, the protagonist is using reported speech which seems to make the whole thing read more like a confession than a novel. Such things might seem as defects at first sight but, as in case of 'The Bell Jar', they just serve to show how difficult it is for a suffering soul to give their experience a popular form. May be novel as an art is still developing. The author also discussed the difficulty faced in this transition in his Nobel prize accepting speech too.

Another thing worth noticing in the speech was that IK used the pronoun 'we' while discussing what brought Holocausts. He refused to think of it as something brought down on people by some outlandish demons that probably won't happen again. And let us face it - we are still very much the same people who gave power to Nazis, we still love psychopaths, we still vote according to whom we hate and we still need scapegoats and easily learn to hate first the things we wish to harm:

"Somehow, from his angry look and his deft sleight of hand, I suddenly understood why his train of thought would make it impossible to abide Jews, for otherwise he might have had the unpleasant feeling that he was cheating them."

What makes this book stand out is that it is not the big atrocities like ones showed in Schindler's Camp that are described in detail but rather the general experience - not only boredom but amid never ending hunger constantly stocking his consciousness, injuries, suicidal thoughts camps there were still happy moments:

" “...I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.”

Another thing, and one that I like to see in protagonists, is the kafkaesque efforts made by the fifteen-year old protagonist to understand the world around him and to speculate how it come out to be such - how they must have come up with all those ideas to make such a brilliant camp. His position is further worsened and made absurd by his lack of significant desire to identify himself as a Jew. He isn't very religious (" I yearned more for sleep than prayers") and doesn't know Hebrew - this attracts disgust from some of his fellow prisoners who claim that he is no Jew. At one point, he retorts by calling one of them 'lousy Jew'.

And yet, it is because he is a Jew, he is forced to suffer. The whole novel is about his coming to terms with his fate. In the very beginning, he gives an impression as if he is an outsider (like those Kafka characters) who is suddenly made to accept a role he doesn't understand:

"You too," he said, "are now a part of the shared Jewish fate,"

In the end, he does come to terms with it - and, no it didn't mean to forget the whole thing as a bad incidence in his life (a whole year)

" we can never start a new life, only ever carry on the old one."

Nor he would be pittied, but still he is sure he will find happinness:

" I already know there will be happiness. For even there, next to the chimneys, in the intervals between the torments, there was something that resembled happiness. Everyone asks only about the hardships and the "atrocities," whereas for me perhaps it is that experience which will remain the most memorable. Yes, the next time I am asked, I ought to speak about that, the happiness of the concentration camps."