Book description
Fourteen-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 unexpectedly pulled off the bus and
detained without explanation This is the start of his journey to and
subsequent imprisonment in Auschwitz. On arrival he finds he is unable
to identify with other Jews, and in turn is rejected by them. An
outsider among his own people, his estrangement makes him a
preternaturally acute observer.
Fatelessness' power lies in its refusal to mitigate the
unfathomable alienness of the Holocaust, the strangeness is compounded
by Georg's dogmatic insistence on making sense of everything he witnesses.
Imre Kertész, who was born in 1929 and imprisoned in Auschwitz as a
youth, worked as a journalist and playwright before publishing
Fatelessness, his first novel, in 1975. He was awarded the Nobel Prize
in 2002. He lives in Budapest.
