Fatelessness

A Novel

De: Imre Kertész, Tom Wilkinson - translator

Narrado por: Josh Bloomberg

At the age of 14, György Köves 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, György remains an outsider.

The genius of Imre Kertész's unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the strangeness of its events - not least of which is György'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.

©2007 Imre Kertesz (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

A different perspective

I believe the point of the book was to express the sometimes “mundane” as one reviewer suggests. As the author is a Holocaust survivor I don’t believe it was mundane to him rather he’s trying to express the less horrifying yet just as important; his every day emotions. No one can imagine a concentration camp, only the people who experienced it can share their imprisonment. I enjoyed the narrator very much.

Shockingly Mundane

After decades of horrifying descriptions of the Holocaust, I found myself deeply moved by this story of a 14-year-old boy’s “Routine“ disappearance into a series of Nazi concentration camps. Written by Hungarian Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, This least sensational account of the event that has done more than any other to alter our sense of what it means to be human will quietly and swiftly permeate your feelings and thoughts about “what it must have been like.“ Unforgettable in its details of observation and character.