Fatelessness: a Novel [J0475]

2004 PB reprint of the 1975 original; clean with minor cover wear. Translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson. 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.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "What a profound ending and what a truly unique book in its telling of the atrocities experienced in concentration camps. Its ability to successfully capture the adolescent perspective is what makes this book so powerful."; "Wildly unique and completely different than other holocaust survival memoirs I've read."; "A chilling re-telling of a Holocaust story but not the usual one. The author shows the mundane, trivial aspects of life and the shock of the treatment he receives hits you differently. The main character never asks once why it is happening to him, he just keeps on going."