I obtained this book because my maiden name is Kertesz, and although it is a common name in Hungary, I wondered if the author might be related to my father's family. But the author is Jewish, although his character in the book is a secular Jew, and I am not. Jewish, that is. Unless of course, Like former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, I really am.

The book is a first person narration by a teen-age boy who, during World War II, is sent to Aushwitz, then to Buchenwald. He tells his story in a matter-of-fact tone, without any overt rancor for the horrible conditions he finds. He is merely amazed when he realizes what is causing the smell and the smoke at Aushwitz, and he thinks about the people who were sent to the other line and realizes what that actually meant. Because he is young and healthy, he is still alive.

But as the story progresses and he is sent to a work detail at a different camp where the food dwindles, his inadequate footwear creates open sores and the guards beat him, he finds life slipping away. But he still doesn't complain about the bad treatment, he just tells us what it was like. He doesn't say he misses his family or think about dying, until he finds himself in such poor condition he cannot go on and he collapses, collected by his fellow inmates and dumped in a cart with others too sick and weak to work. He figures he may be going to the "showers" that dispense gas instead of water, but it doesn't happen. He lands in a hospital of sorts within the camp where fellow inmates treat him with kindness, which he is slow to understand. He is hampered by the different languages his fellow prisoners speak, but he begins to feel that life is good. He is no longer on the work detail, he is allowed to rest, and this continues until the camp is liberated.

But there is no triumphant scene with GI Joe barging in and rounding up Nazis, just a young boy listening to the voices on the loudspeaker repeat in all the languages spoken in the camp that they are all free. There is no big reaction by the narrator to this news. He just wants to get his daily ration of soup. But the story does take us forward to his journey back to Hungary to his home. He finds another family living in the apartment he shared with his father and step-mother. He learns from a neighbor that his father, who, earlier in the story had been ordered to a work camp, has died in Nazi captivity and his step-mother has remarried to the man to whom the boy's father had left his business. Fortunately, he also has a mother, who is alive.

As the narrator is on his way home, he meets a number of people who are curious about the camps, and they want to know if there were really gas chambers. Our boy, who is still limping and in pain from his injuries, tells them, yes, there were gas chambers, but he is strangely unwilling to say anything further, or to express anger at what he's been through. The word "Nazi" is not used in the book. It is this flat unemotional tone that makes this book unusual, and I can only think it must in many ways mirror the author's own experience, as he himself was a prisoner at Buchenwald.

I admit I twice stopped reading this book, thinking I could not bear to go on with it, but each time I felt I had to finish a book by an author with my family name. While the narrator does not engage in angry denunciations, he doesn't have to - the tale he tells has plenty of impact and the words are emotinally difficult to read. Was the narrator a victim of "Stockholm Syndrome" where prisoners begin to identify with their captors? Or was he simply shutting down his feelings in order to survive? There are no long ruminations about the political scene and what went wrong, no moral judgments on a society gone off the deep end. There is just the words of a young boy telling how he happened to be on a bus one day when the bus was stopped by guards and all Jews were told to get off. The boy could not pretend he was not Jewish since he was wearing the yellow star that Jews were required to wear. So he got off the bus and that began his trip to Aushwitz where a "doctor" decided he could go to the line that was sent to a shower dispensing water, not gas.

This book reminded me of another book that was equally difficult reading because of its emotional impact, another story told as a simple narration of terrible conditions, a book without any real plot, just like Fatelessness. The book is George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London." This was a book that left me profoundly grateful for having a comfortable place to sleep at night and enough food to eat every day.

Imre Kertesz' book, like Orwell's, is an achievement in understatement, a simple narrative that lets you decide how you feel about the story. I don't know if Imre Kertesz is my relative, but my grandparents came to America from Hungary in the early years of the Twentieth Century, so they did not have to live through having their homeland taken over by Germans or live behind the "Iron Curtain" under Soviet domination. But I can't help but wonder if any of my relatives who stayed in Hungary suffered like the boy in this story, and I am grateful that my grandparents, John and Mary Kertesz, came to America.

This novel didn't do for me what it obviously has done for many other reviewers. It is a meticulously told tale, oddly mundane, perhaps lacking the narrative drive readers seek. The author goes about finding life in the death camps to which he has been sent. The book is not in the least depressing. It is to some degree inspiring, in so far as the narrator is in fact able to find life where others have found death. He is relentlessly optimistic. Told from a child's point of view, the story tracks a young Jewish boy's movements among several of the most notorious death camps of the Third Reich. The setting is familiar to everyone, but the boy's perspective is unique. He empathizes with those he comes in contact. He searches for signs of humanity and usually find them. He looks for what is familiar and understandable even among the guards, his tormentors, the killers and brutalizers - all receive equal treatment, as it were; none is judged and condemned. My morality is not sufficiently well-developed to be so forgiving, so I found this less compelling that one might. As an existential tract it has its merits, no doubt, but as fiction its lack of discrimination and passion creates a weak theme. The death camps, after all, were not life camps. The perspective of the survivor is a compelling one, but the camps were not only about survivors. The author perhaps overlooks the fact that a life in the shadows of the crematoria smoke stacks may not be a life worth living. It also must be remembered that these institutions of death did not come about as tragic events like earthquakes but were man made horrors. Man may always be man, but sometimes he acts the beast and we shouldn't hesitate to say so.

Some writers try to shock. At least it often seems that they embark upon a novel with that in mind. They create books set in times of conflict, amid war or pestilence, where the context is vivid, horrific or even repulsive. And often it is so well known that we engage with the setting, the context or scenario, rather than the plight of the characters. Or sometimes writers deliberately try to portray the unsavoury, often attempting to present sadistic brainlessness in a form that suggests anti-hero, ignoring the requirement that such a character needs at least some aspect of the heroic to deserve the name. These bite-sized pieces of nastiness are thus presented in a form that is easily digested in the end, the product usually attaining only triteness. Meanwhile others try to deliver blood and guts, their raison d'etre, as a means of eliciting revulsion and shock in the reader.

And then sometimes - rarely, in fact - we are presented with the truly shocking in a matter of fact way. Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich might fall into this category. The narrative just about never asks why anything happens; it just does and we, the readers, along with the subject of the story go along with whatever is demanded. We are invited to experience the unacceptable alongside and along with the characters, and in doing so we are invited to confront what we ourselves might have done in such circumstances. These books locate the reader within the experience, never merely tell us about it.

In Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz the writer elevates this form to another level. Not only are we presented with an inexplicable, an unrationalisable concentration camp experience of a fourteen-year-old Jewish boy, we are also presented with a character who apparently can neither feel nor express malice. As he wastes away, we are constantly confronted with an empathetic version of ourselves. Would we have reacted in this way? Would we have merely gone along with things, cooperatively, like this? Or would we have rebelled? Would we have had the guts to stand up? And what would have happened if we did? Could we have watched ourselves starve to death? And if we were to find ourselves required to do it, would we then react? Would we rebel? And if so to what purpose? And would we have survived?

Fatelessness is the story of Georg Koves, a Jewish boy from Budapest, who, one day, is diverted from his journey to work along with his mates. No-one bothers to tell the group what might be happening or where they might be going. Georg, however, goes carefully and cooperatively along with everything his directors ask. He makes train journeys, works in concentration camps, falls sick, recovers and survives, though perhaps his society does not. Names do not matter where he goes. Numbers identify, provide a pecking order of privilege that offers no more than survival into another day. But to be merely near one such survivor endows real kudos, if only by proximity of association.

Throughout Fatelessness one is confronted with a question. How might I have coped? Would I have done the same as this ultimately trusting, suffering lad? Would I have survived? And if I did, or even if I did not, would I have used the same or similar resources as this hero?

Fatelessness is a harrowing read, though it never sets out to shock. Life takes you where it goes, irrespective of whether it starts in a privileged family in New York or a ghettoed Jewish confine in 1940s Budapest. One makes of life what it presents, be it wealth, riches, starvation or death. And that's that. It's the detail along the way that makes the journey, however.

I have always been very interested in how people can cope with/mentally survive atrocities like the holocaust. The camps affect my own deepest fears. I always think I wouldnt have lasted a day in such a place. It must have been hell there.
Somehow, although the atrocities he describes are still hellish, this book gives me hope that in any situation you (me) can live, and that there's nothing to be afraid of. Things just are.
There are few books that have impressed me so much as this one. Its for me a perspective how one can cope with something so unbelievable dreadfull, as the camps were.

A difficult subject to say the least is handled in such a way as to make the reader feel that they lived it too. The writing is crisp and clear in its desciption and it drewas you right into the story.

A difficult subject to say the least is handled in such a way as to make the reader feel that they lived it too. The writing is crisp and clear in its desciption and it drewas you right into the story.

I read the 1992 translation by Christopher and Katharina Wilson. Originally written in Hungarian, this fictionalized memoir of a young Jewish teenage boy's year in Auschwitz and Buchenwald toward the end of the war brilliantly succeeds in giving the reader an intimate look at human beings in the camps. Georg Koves is a sensitive, intelligent 14-year-old who loves his friends, wants to do well, and is an obedient son. We see him in this account at first surrounded by family, his uncles, his grandparents, and the neighbors as they all gather one evening to comfort his father and say goodbye to him. Georg's father has been ordered to a labor camp, and one day, two months later, he too, along with his friends, is transported to Auschwitz, where he is picked, after a two-second exam, as a laborer. Georg narrates his experience thereafter almost in a Kafkaesque matter-of-fact fashion, always attempting to find a rationale for the actions of the camp leaders and the German officers. He describes the people around him in realistic detail and as steadying presences who slowly vanish. After weeks and months of boredom and routine and deprivation, he realizes that his body is turning against him. Georg is a consciousness in these awful places that could easily be anyone's, and that is what makes this account so chilling. The reader watches Georg's awful world from within. Georg's stance is the following: "...we begin something new with the best of intentions--even in a concentration camp." He also sees the events around him as "givens," not as punishment or fate. He is an existentialist in hell. This book is disturbing in its realism, moving in its detail, unique in its coldly rational narration, and chilling in its immediacy. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to know how some people lived through the worst atrocities the human race has ever known.

I read the 1992 translation by Christopher and Katharina Wilson. Originally written in Hungarian, this fictionalized memoir of a young Jewish teenage boy's year in Auschwitz and Buchenwald toward the end of the war brilliantly succeeds in giving the reader an intimate look at human beings in the camps. Georg Koves is a sensitive, intelligent 14-year-old who loves his friends, wants to do well, and is an obedient son. We see him in this account at first surrounded by family, his uncles, his grandparents, and the neighbors as they all gather one evening to comfort his father and say goodbye to him. Georg's father has been ordered to a labor camp, and one day, two months later, he too, along with his friends, is transported to Auschwitz, where he is picked, after a two-second exam, as a laborer. Georg narrates his experience thereafter almost in a Kafkaesque matter-of-fact fashion, always attempting to find a rationale for the actions of the camp leaders and the German officers. He describes the people around him in realistic detail and as steadying presences who slowly vanish. After weeks and months of boredom and routine and deprivation, he realizes that his body is turning against him. Georg is a consciousness in these awful places that could easily be anyone's, and that is what makes this account so chilling. The reader watches Georg's awful world from within. Georg's stance is the following: "...we begin something new with the best of intentions--even in a concentration camp." He also sees the events around him as "givens," not as punishment or fate. He is an existentialist in hell. This book is disturbing in its realism, moving in its detail, unique in its coldly rational narration, and chilling in its immediacy. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to know how some people lived through the worst atrocities the human race has ever known.

Anyone who reads the poor first translation of Fateless and the shamefully bad translation of Kaddish cannot even get close to the true spirit of the original works.
Thanks to Tim Wilkinson English speakers can finally enjoy these excellent books.
Look for the titles "Fatelessness" and "Kaddish for an Unborn Child", both translated by Wilkinson. These new editions are at last worthy of the originals and the Nobel Prize.
(See also October 16, 2002 review by Marton Sass)
A movie based on the novel Fateless is also out with English subtitles; don't miss it, if you have a chance. Beautiful work.

Anyone who reads the poor first translation of Fateless and the shamefully bad translation of Kaddish cannot even get close to the true spirit of the original works.
Thanks to Tim Wilkinson English speakers can finally enjoy these excellent books.
Look for the titles "Fatelessness" and "Kaddish for an Unborn Child", both translated by Wilkinson. These new editions are at last worthy of the originals and the Nobel Prize.
(See also October 16, 2002 review by Marton Sass)
A movie based on the novel Fateless is also out with English subtitles; don't miss it, if you have a chance. Beautiful work.

Many sentient being out there, who was, even remotely aware of something we human called World War II, aked himself, why? And, as tragedy dictates, found no answer. It came even to that, that one has to ask himself, can there, after all, rational answer be possible. And answer to that questions eludes many today.
Written by a Hungarian nobel prize winner, who served his time in concentration camps, this book doesen't provide an answer. Neither i t intenede to provide them. Instead, it deliver another set of questions. Questions that are interesting, highly depressive and lucid. Though you may find it's scarry logic rather unatractive, you'll have to stop and ask yourself, can he be right. And if the answer is positive, what conclusion does it give to us, and do we really want to accept it.
This is excellent writing, one you shouldn't skip or let it pass you by. Every culture out there, and every individual should be aware of this book. Perhaps then, we could be able to deny truthfulness of the "History repeats itself" sentence.

Who every day must conquer them anew.

These words of Goethe provide the emotional context within which I experienced Imre Kertész' masterful novel Fateless.

Kertesz was an assimilated Hungarian-Jew living in relative comfort in Budapest. In the summer of 1944 he was picked up and shipped to Auschwitz. He was fourteen years old. He was transferred from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, from Buchenwald to Zeitz (a lesser-known concentration camp) and then back to Buchenwald. He was liberated a year later and returned to Budapest.

The life of György (George) Köves, the protagonist of Fateless, tracks the experiences of Kertesz. The novel is written in George's voice and we see the world through his recollection of events. (Kertesz has indicated in interviews that although Fateless takes the form of an autobiographical novel it is not an autobiography but a work of fiction.) George is a relatively care free, naive 14 year old leading a middle class life with his family. As the story opens, the family is preparing to say goodbye to George's father who is being sent to a labor camp. I was struck immediately by George's detachment as these early events unfold. George obtains a job at a factory. This provides him with a pass out of his neighborhood although he is still required to wear a yellow star identifying him as Jewish. One morning, on the way to work, he is swept up along with thousands of others and is sent on his journey into the seven layers of hell known as concentration camps. The rest of novel details George's experiences in the camps, his gradual physical deterioration that leaves him near death, the chain of events that kept him alive, his liberation and his eventual return to Budapest.

I expected that any book that had the Holocaust as a central theme would be filled with vivid descriptions of the horrors found there and the emotional turmoil that any prisoner experienced. In fact, the opposite was the case. George's narrative is, until the very end, devoid of emotion. It consists of a spare, narrative recitation of events. I think the book was all the more chilling and had a greater emotional impact as a result. No words can adequately describe the horrors and misery and Kertesz does not really try. Rather, the emotion is inferred from the factual context. At one point, George finds a mirror and looks at his image. He sees in himself the gaunt vision of shuffling prisoners that met him on his arrival at the camps. He doesn't complain, he simply observes. The observation is stunning not for its emotional content but for the very fact of it.

I was also struck by the irony expressed in many of Kertesz' passages. George, like Kertesz, was not particularly religious nor did he speak the lingua franca of many European Jews, Yiddish. Despite his presence in the camp he was rejected by many of his fellow prisoners because he was not, in their eyes, sufficiently Jewish. He didn't know Yiddish nor did he know enough Hebrew to recite the Kaddish, a prayer for the dead. George's camp experience was one of double isolation.

George's emotions only rise to the surface upon his return to Budapest after liberation. He is on a trolley, filthy and malnourished. He can feel the scorn and snickering of his fellow passengers and seethes with anger, an emotion seemingly permitted to enter into his life now that his freedom is assured. He returns to his family apartment only to find that it has been appropriated by another family. His family and friends tell him to put the camps into his past, but he can't, it is an experience that will never be `in the past'. Kertesz, in his Nobel Prize lecture sums it up thusly: "By which I mean that nothing has happened since Auschwitz that could reverse or refute Auschwitz. In my writings the Holocaust could never be present in the past tense."

The novel ends with George pondering the meaning of life and fate. He posits that those that accept fate can never be free and those seeking freedom cannot do so if the live by the axiom "it is written". The closing puts George's whole camp experience in a new perspective. Some struggle outwardly for freedom. George's struggle was completely internalized. His struggle for life itself was a struggle to be free. As the Russian novelist Vasily Grossman asserted in his book Forever Flowing, "there remained alive and growing one genuine force alone, consisting of one element only - freedom. To live meant to be a free human being."

The story of George Koves is the story of a young boy who struggled every Day for freedom and for life and conquered them anew. It is a powerful book and one that I cannot recommend too highly.

Who every day must conquer them anew.

These words of Goethe provide the emotional context within which I experienced Imre Kertýsz' masterful novel Fateless.

Kertesz was an assimilated Hungarian-Jew living in relative comfort in Budapest. In the summer of 1944 he was picked up and shipped to Auschwitz. He was fourteen years old. He was transferred from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, from Buchenwald to Zeitz (a lesser-known concentration camp) and then back to Buchenwald. He was liberated a year later and returned to Budapest.

The life of Gyýrgy (George) Kýves, the protagonist of Fateless, tracks the experiences of Kertesz. The novel is written in George's voice and we see the world through his recollection of events. (Kertesz has indicated in interviews that although Fateless takes the form of an autobiographical novel it is not an autobiography but a work of fiction.) George is a relatively care free, naive 14 year old leading a middle class life with his family. As the story opens, the family is preparing to say goodbye to George's father who is being sent to a labor camp. I was struck immediately by George's detachment as these early events unfold. George obtains a job at a factory. This provides him with a pass out of his neighborhood although he is still required to wear a yellow star identifying him as Jewish. One morning, on the way to work, he is swept up along with thousands of others and is sent on his journey into the seven layers of hell known as concentration camps. The rest of novel details George's experiences in the camps, his gradual physical deterioration that leaves him near death, the chain of events that kept him alive, his liberation and his eventual return to Budapest.

I expected that any book that had the Holocaust as a central theme would be filled with vivid descriptions of the horrors found there and the emotional turmoil that any prisoner experienced. In fact, the opposite was the case. George's narrative is, until the very end, devoid of emotion. It consists of a spare, narrative recitation of events. I think the book was all the more chilling and had a greater emotional impact as a result. No words can adequately describe the horrors and misery and Kertesz does not really try. Rather, the emotion is inferred from the factual context. At one point, George finds a mirror and looks at his image. He sees in himself the gaunt vision of shuffling prisoners that met him on his arrival at the camps. He doesn't complain, he simply observes. The observation is stunning not for its emotional content but for the very fact of it.

I was also struck by the irony expressed in many of Kertesz' passages. George, like Kertesz, was not particularly religious nor did he speak the lingua franca of many European Jews, Yiddish. Despite his presence in the camp he was rejected by many of his fellow prisoners because he was not, in their eyes, sufficiently Jewish. He didn't know Yiddish nor did he know enough Hebrew to recite the Kaddish, a prayer for the dead. George's camp experience was one of double isolation.

George's emotions only rise to the surface upon his return to Budapest after liberation. He is on a trolley, filthy and malnourished. He can feel the scorn and snickering of his fellow passengers and seethes with anger, an emotion seemingly permitted to enter into his life now that his freedom is assured. He returns to his family apartment only to find that it has been appropriated by another family. His family and friends tell him to put the camps into his past, but he can't, it is an experience that will never be `in the past'. Kertesz, in his Nobel Prize lecture sums it up thusly: "By which I mean that nothing has happened since Auschwitz that could reverse or refute Auschwitz. In my writings the Holocaust could never be present in the past tense."

The novel ends with George pondering the meaning of life and fate. He posits that those that accept fate can never be free and those seeking freedom cannot do so if the live by the axiom "it is written". The closing puts George's whole camp experience in a new perspective. Some struggle outwardly for freedom. George's struggle was completely internalized. His struggle for life itself was a struggle to be free. As the Russian novelist Vasily Grossman asserted in his book Forever Flowing, "there remained alive and growing one genuine force alone, consisting of one element only - freedom. To live meant to be a free human being."

The story of George Koves is the story of a young boy who struggled every Day for freedom and for life and conquered them anew. It is a powerful book and one that I cannot recommend too highly.

One of the most remarkable first person singular novels I have read. Remarkable because the subject, a 14 year old Hungarian boy, speaks his experiential truth about being shepherded and transported into the concentration camps of Nazi Germany but still responds to the beauty and advantages of life as it is lived - colours, order, friends. For example, the benefit of getting on the train to Auschwitz early as the early trains have "only" 60 people to a boxcar whereas the later ones are expected to have 80. At the destination station under his feet "was the customary crushed stone; and then an immaculate white asphalt road (which) disappeared into infinity."(p61) And the observation that nowhere is a kind of ordered life-style, a kind of exemplary behaviour, even an ethic, as important as in captivity.(p100) And then the experience of freedom where the old lady on a tram turns away from him in apparent disgust at his appearance, but old Mr Steiner "gave me a hug just as I was, in my hat, striped prisoner's coat, and all sweaty." p 184. SHOW me a more heartbreaking sentence in literature! There is also the questioning of his experience - did you SEE with your own eyes the gassing? No. So you're basing your statement on rumour and gossip? Yes.
I have never understood REAL hunger until I read this novel. Our young hero is upset on the day of his liberation because he misses out on his scheduled soup ration!
A remarkable and memorable read, that is at once gripping, involving, and emotionally powerful.

One of the most remarkable first person singular novels I have read. Remarkable because the subject, a 14 year old Hungarian boy, speaks his experiential truth about being shepherded and transported into the concentration camps of Nazi Germany but still responds to the beauty and advantages of life as it is lived - colours, order, friends. For example, the benefit of getting on the train to Auschwitz early as the early trains have "only" 60 people to a boxcar whereas the later ones are expected to have 80. At the destination station under his feet "was the customary crushed stone; and then an immaculate white asphalt road (which) disappeared into infinity."(p61) And the observation that nowhere is a kind of ordered life-style, a kind of exemplary behaviour, even an ethic, as important as in captivity.(p100) And then the experience of freedom where the old lady on a tram turns away from him in apparent disgust at his appearance, but old Mr Steiner "gave me a hug just as I was, in my hat, striped prisoner's coat, and all sweaty." p 184. SHOW me a more heartbreaking sentence in literature! There is also the questioning of his experience - did you SEE with your own eyes the gassing? No. So you're basing your statement on rumour and gossip? Yes.
I have never understood REAL hunger until I read this novel. Our young hero is upset on the day of his liberation because he misses out on his scheduled soup ration!
A remarkable and memorable read, that is at once gripping, involving, and emotionally powerful.

I was amazed with the utter candor of the narrator. The story is a blow-by-blow description of the horrors of the Holocaust, all narrated through the eyes of a 15 year old. Few books have described such personal tragedies in such a human way. Kertesz deserved the Nobel for this work. Read the book, its short and really well done.

This book, although morbid (let's face it, it's about the Holocaust) is spellbinding. The perspective and the conclusions drawn regarding the Holocaust are unexpected and profound. A short, beautiful read.

I think it is no wonder Kertesz was relatively unknown in Hungary. I'm usually not into Holocaust novels and read this one only because of all the hype it has got, so I can't compare it to other Holocaust stories, but if I compare it to any other novel I've ever read I would say this is among the worse ones. The characterization is flat and the dreadful events don't seem to have any impact on the hero of the novel, thus fail to evoke emotions in the reader. The only interesting thing is the description of everyday life in a death camp, about which I haven't read more detailed description than this one.