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    Fatelessness (Hardback) By (author) Irmre Kertesz

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    Short Description for FatelessnessFourteen-year-old Gyuri is let off going to school for 'family reasons'. His father has been called up for labour service. Arriving at the family timber store Gyuri witnesses his father sign over the business to the firm's book-keeper with nonchalance and boredom. Two months laters after saying goodbye to his father he finds himself assigned to a 'permanent workplace'. Within a fortnight Gyuri is ...
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    Fatelessness3

    Mark Thwaite

    Despite writing numerous books, nobel-prize winning Imre Kertész work remains shockingly difficult to get hold of. In the US, the publisher Knopf have Tim Wilkinson's able translations of Kaddish for an Unborn Child and Liquidation but in the UK all we have is Kertész's autobiographical debut novel Fatelessness. The rest remain untranslated. 


    Kertész was born in Budapest on 9th November 1929. Of Jewish descent, in 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz and from there to Buchenwald, where he was liberated in 1945.


    Hungarian teenager György Köves, a naive and innocent guide, narrates. His 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 Fatelessness is simply because we know the story quite as well as we do.) But, as told by György, what was happening to him was more strange than hellish, the horror more surreal than visceral. This is not quite right: for György the horror is elsewhere, what is happening to him is just 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 novel describes a situation where the atrocity of the Holocaust is both right in front of us and somehow 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. At the the end of the novel, György refuses to write an article for a newspaper about his experiences because he knows he would be used as a cipher or an emblem.


    Journalism seeks representatives or archetypes or stereotypes; literature cleaves to something smaller and truer. Fatelessness achieves its power by being literature.


     

    by Mark Thwaite

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