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    Fateless (Paperback) By (author) Irmre Kertesz

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    Short Description for FatelessFourteen-year-old Gyuri's father has been called up for labour service. Arriving at the family timber store he witnesses with nonchalance and boredom his father sign over the business to the firm's book-keeper. Two months later he finds himself assigned to a "permanent workplace", but within a fortnight he is unexpectedly pulled off a bus.
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    Fateless3

    Mark Thwaite In Fateless, Hungarian teenager György Köves, a naive and innocent guide, narrates Imre Kertész's debut, autobiographical novel. György's father is about to be sent to a "labour" camp and the family is busy getting ready for his departure. At the family get-together organised to say goodbye to his father tensions surface. Not much later, taking a bus journey to work, György is taken first to Auschwitz and then on to Buchenwald. The bulk of the novel is his first-hand account of his experiences in the camps.
    It is Kertész's tone that is remarkable throughout the novel. As told by György, the horrors of the concentration camp are never theatricalised. Callow throughout, György records and recounts, but never descends to hyperbole. Of course, he has no need. The horror is well known to us. (Indeed, there is a danger that we do not see quite how remarkable, restrained and radical Fateless is simply because we know the story quite as well as we do.) But, as told by György, what is happening to him is more strange than hellish, the horror more surreal than frightening. This is not quite right: for György the horror is elsewhere, what is happening to him is curious and miserable.
    Inside the world of the camp, György is keen to understand what is happening as rational, understandable. Whether this is simple a defense mechanism or not it makes for a very powerful book. Pitched somewhere between wide-eyed and perplexed, Kertész's remarkable novel describes a situation where the atrocity of the Holocaust is both right in front of us and somehow always hidden. Kertész seems to be saying that György did not experience History (History only ever being a construction, an agglomeration of events), but rather merely suffered terribly. by Mark Thwaite

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