Fatelessness

At the age of fourteen, Gyrgy Kves 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 doesnt 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, Gyrgy remains an outsider.The genius of Imre Kertszs unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the strangeness of its eventsnot least of which is Gyrgys 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.