Fatelessness
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Manufacturer: Vintage
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 894.511334
EAN: 9781400078639
ISBN: 1400078636
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: 2004-12-07
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2004-12-07
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Reviews:
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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.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Holocaust, Up Close and Personal
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Flowers in the Rubble
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Utterly harrowing, shocking experience, packed with humility and humanity
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: disturbing account
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Easy to read dispite the difficult Subject
Comment: 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.
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