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A review by christopherc
Fateless by Imre Kertész
5.0
Imre Kertesz's FATELESS ("Sorstalansag") is a remarkable and original work within the harrowing field of Holocaust literature. While the bulk of the novel chronicles incomprehensible savagery and pain, the last section of the book makes a number of confessions which transform the author's message completely and make a daring break with other Holocaust writers such as Primo Levi. For a reader who doesn't know what to expect, the ending is shocking (though empowering and hope-giving).
The narrator is a 15-year old Jewish boy living in a suburb of Budapest. As the novel opens, he is saying goodbye to his father, who is leaving for the compulsory labor forced upon Jews by Hungary's Nazi-allied government of the time. A few months later, the narrator is himself shocked to be rounded up with other Jews, under a plan to send them to work within Germany. As they arrive in Auschwitz they naively assume that it will be a place where, though the work is hard, they'll have fun new experiences and meet new people before returning home. Within a few days they realise the purpose of the sinister smokestacks of the camp: they belong to incinerators where the infirm and old among them are disposed of after being murdered in gas chambers. This is only the beginning of the unimaginably terrible journey of the narrator, for he goes on to Buchenwald and Zeits before the Americans liberate his camp and he returns to Hungary.
I can't comment on the translation, having read the translation into Esperanto by Istvan Ertl, but I think that the language of the novel would be preserved quite well in English. The narrator of Kertesz's work speaks in a simple and unadored (but never austere) style. The narrator reports what he sees in a matter-of-fact style, understanding that he doesn't need to make long moral proclamations because any human being can recognise the inhumanity of the setting.
If one reads only a single novel about the Holocaust, it should be this one. No other writer has captured the complexity of a victim's thoughts as Kertesz, and the Nobel prize was well-deserved.
The narrator is a 15-year old Jewish boy living in a suburb of Budapest. As the novel opens, he is saying goodbye to his father, who is leaving for the compulsory labor forced upon Jews by Hungary's Nazi-allied government of the time. A few months later, the narrator is himself shocked to be rounded up with other Jews, under a plan to send them to work within Germany. As they arrive in Auschwitz they naively assume that it will be a place where, though the work is hard, they'll have fun new experiences and meet new people before returning home. Within a few days they realise the purpose of the sinister smokestacks of the camp: they belong to incinerators where the infirm and old among them are disposed of after being murdered in gas chambers. This is only the beginning of the unimaginably terrible journey of the narrator, for he goes on to Buchenwald and Zeits before the Americans liberate his camp and he returns to Hungary.
I can't comment on the translation, having read the translation into Esperanto by Istvan Ertl, but I think that the language of the novel would be preserved quite well in English. The narrator of Kertesz's work speaks in a simple and unadored (but never austere) style. The narrator reports what he sees in a matter-of-fact style, understanding that he doesn't need to make long moral proclamations because any human being can recognise the inhumanity of the setting.
If one reads only a single novel about the Holocaust, it should be this one. No other writer has captured the complexity of a victim's thoughts as Kertesz, and the Nobel prize was well-deserved.