Fateless

Rating:
Summary: To Hell And Back!
Review: Imre Kertesz has truly created a masterpiece. As indicated by his 2002 Nobel Prize for his life's work, the Nobel Committee thought so as well. The book is written not using any extensive vocabulary. Not once did I have to turn to the dictionary, yet, with his simple language, Kertesz brings a feeling and depth to the book, which is almost unique. In many ways, it is reminiscent of Saramago and J. M. Coetzee in this respect, but Kertesz actually does it better.

The story of a 15 year old boy, Kertesz himself, from Hungary, who is unwittingly rounded up and sent to Auschwitz is truly unique. Not only is the viewpoint unique, but the way he responded to the environment is extremely unique.

This is somewhat due to his naivete, which within a year would be totally gone, never to be recalled; but also to his ability to dissociate so effectively so as not to really feel the physical discomforts of his situation. In addition, it is interesting to see so graphically, how one can go from total health to virtual death in just one year of exposure to the concentration camps.

Another almost unimaginable concept that Kertesz weaves into "Fateless" is an almost tangible feeling amongst concentration camp dwellers of "a longing for Buchenwald." At Buchenwald, conditions were so radically different, that mostly Jewish prisoners longed for the peace, serenity and benefits that Buchenwald had to offer in comparison to a camp such as Auschwitz/Birkenau, which had the sole purpose of extermination. They were designed as extermination factories. Not so with Buchenwald, at least not nearly in the same manner.

Early in the book, Kertesz introduces what he conceives as "Fatelessness." He is talking to a Jewish girl, and he comments that if she had been switched in the hospital, her whole life would be different. The author characterizes and quotes her response as follows:

"With a crackling voice, she desperately shouted something to the effect that if our distintiveness was unimportant, then all this was mere chance, and that if there was the possibility of her being someone other than whom she was fated to be, then all this was utterly without reason, and to her that idea was totally "unbearable." Thus Kertesz really seems to be saying in accordance with that definition, All of us are fateless, regardless of religion, we could all be living a different life, and be a different religion, at the whim of a hospital orderly. Thus, we are all "Fateless."

In slightly less than 200 pages, Kertesz shows a mastery that is rare and intricate. Yet not difficult to read, only slow to read, as the wording and each line is so important, that it takes attention and thought to understand his sentiment and feelings. Yet, it is such an unusual perspective, that it is worth reading merely to see his viewpoint on perhaps the greatest manmade horror of all time.

Rating:
Summary: The most original work within Holocaust literature
Review: Imre Kertesz's FATELESS ("Sorstalansag") is a remarkable and original work within the harrowing field of Holocaust literature. While the bulk of the novel chronicles incomprehensible savagery and pain, the last section of the book makes a number of confessions which transform the author's message completely and make a daring break with other Holocaust writers such as Primo Levi. For a reader who doesn't know what to expect, the ending is shocking (though empowering and hope-giving).

The narrator is a 15-year old Jewish boy living in a suburb of Budapest. As the novel opens, he is saying goodbye to his father, who is leaving for the compulsory labor forced upon Jews by Hungary's Nazi-allied government of the time. A few months later, the narrator is himself shocked to be rounded up with other Jews, under a plan to send them to work within Germany. As they arrive in Auschwitz they naively assume that it will be a place where, though the work is hard, they'll have fun new experiences and meet new people before returning home. Within a few days they realise the purpose of the sinister smokestacks of the camp: they belong to incinerators where the infirm and old among them are disposed of after being murdered in gas chambers. This is only the beginning of the unimaginably terrible journey of the narrator, for he goes on to Buchenwald and Zeits before the Americans liberate his camp and he returns to Hungary.

I can't comment on the translation, having read the translation into Esperanto by Istvan Ertl, but I think that the language of the novel would be preserved quite well in English. The narrator of Kertesz's work speaks in a simple and unadored (but never austere) style. The narrator reports what he sees in a matter-of-fact style, understanding that he doesn't need to make long moral proclamations because any human being can recognise the inhumanity of the setting.

If one reads only a single novel about the Holocaust, it should be this one. No other writer has captured the complexity of a victim's thoughts as Kertesz, and the Nobel prize was well-deserved.

Rating:
Summary: Matter-of-fact, detached, unsentimental p-o-v on the Shoah
Review: Like Louis Begley's Wartime Lies, Jiri Weil's Life With a Star, and Erno Szep's The Smell of Humans, Fateless presents another eyewitness look at the camps. I doubt that much is fictionalized here; the novel is too fragmented and disjointed to work as a seamless work of art. Rather, it conveys how brutality and rationality contest within the viewpoint of the narrator: German efficiency meets mass cruelty. What I liked about this work was its refusal to become manipulative. Granted, there's no pandering to easy emotion here, and that may put off readers looking for a humanizing, life-affirming message-laden story.

The descent from the "easy" to the harsher times, as the narrator must resist giving in like the "Latvians," the long time "Moslems" (sic) who somehow live but have died inside, comes rather suddenly--just as it must have to camp laborers. The infirmary segment, in its refusal to become clarified, marks a powerfully unsettling stage in both the book and the narrator's confrontation with the mystery of the Nazi mentality that cares for a few while killing the many.

Brief as it is, the re-emergence into Budapest after liberation remains equally effective for its quality to one having awakened from the nightmare only to be gawked at by his fellow citizens as he journeys home still in his hodgepodge of camp and castoff attire. Again, the anti-humanism and existentialist quality of Kertesz' book attest to a refusal to accept the facile answer for what can only be described but never truly shared by us.

Unlike other Hungarian works translated into English, I found the prose readable, colloquial, and the tone, while distancing, appropriate to the content. My only suggestion would have been an autobiographical forward or translator's afterward about the author, as this updated framework would have been helpful for those of us who had only heard of Kertesz until his reward of the Nobel laureate.

Rating:
Summary: Life in not so usual prison
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: This year's Nobel Prize for literature.
Review: Oct 2002. This year's Nobel Prize for literature has been won by author Imre Kertesz, whose autobiographical novels explore how individuals can survive when subjected to "barbaric" social forces.
Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1929, Kertesz was deported to Auschwitz at the age of 15, and liberated from Buchenwald in 1945.
He went to work as a journalist on a daily newspaper, but was fired after the communist takeover and sent into the army for two years. He began to write from his "voluntary prison cell" - a one-room flat he shared with his wife - for the next 35 years, supporting himself as a freelance translator of German literature.

Rating:
Summary: Holocaust through the eyes of an adolescent boy
Review: 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.


Rating:
Summary: The greatest book ever!
Review: Reading about Holocaust was not an easy thing for me. This book, Fateless, I just LOVED it!!! I don't know how to describe it word by word, because I did not read it with my brain, but I read it with my heart. I felt how the author, or the narrator felt about his life and the life of the Jewish.

Rating:
Summary: NOBEL Prize
Review: The author of this book has just won the 2002 Nobel Prize for literature. I do not think any more recommendation is needed....

Rating:
Summary: A Powerful and Extraordinary Book
Review: This book about the Holocaust is unique in so many ways. First of all, it is written from the personal perspective of a l5 year old and it is entirely in the first person. Second, the book focuses on the the meaning of these experiences to him in a most unusual way. Trying to cope with the day to day moments of life in a concentration camp, the boy sees his captors in human, sometimes sympathetic terms and views his surroundings in bright, respledant colors which would oridnarily not ever be associated with such an ordeal or experience. This small book is intelligent, beautifully written and surely worthy of the Nobel prize that it won. I could not put this book down once I started it, and came away thinking about this boy's ordeal in an entirely different way. The writing is powerful and pointed, almost even poetic at times. This book is definitely one of the top ten novels that I have ever read, and I have been reading for a long time.

Rating:
Summary: beauty and banality in the face of evil
Review: This book is astonishingly beautiful. I'll admit I never heard of this book or the author Kertesz until he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I will also admit I only picked it up because of the prize, and that the subject matter - concentration camps of World War II meant it sat around for several weeks while I debated whether there really was any reason to read one more account of the horrors of WWII - hasn't it all been said. But then I began to read and I was enchanted by the voice of the narrator - a young, bright non-religious Jew who precisely because he doesn't understand what is going on, presents us all with an authentic sense of his world. The chapter where he first arrives and ses all the convicts and wonders what they did to arrive there then follows him through the showers and shavings of his body and the clothing he is handed and his suddens realization that he too is now a convict is presented without editorilizing on identity, so that when he is transformed you feel it, not think it. There is no attempt to manipulate your feelings with pathos or self-pity, nor is there the bitterness of regret that comes from looking back. This book is written as it was experienced, so that there is no attempt to editoralize the situations or fit them into what shoudl be said. Thus we get both moments of horror and humor, of beauty even as the crematoriums smoke, of total selfishness and stubborn selflessness. Consider this passage when the very ill narrator is almost tossed in with the corpses and soon to be corpses arriving at Buchenwald, and is hoping for death's release: "Here and there suspicious smoke mixed with the more friendly vapors and from somewhere the sound of a familiar clanging reached out to me lke the ringing of bells in one's dreams... in spite of any other consideration, rational thought..I couldn't mistake the furtive words of some kind of quiet desire rising from within myself, as if embarrassed by their senselessness...I would so like to live a little longer in this beautiful concentration camp!" This is an extraordinaryly honest book of - not the concentration camps - but of a fellow human being - and that is why one should read it.