Fatelessness, Sorstalanság in the Hungarian original of 1975, is the most uncompromising Holocaust novel in the major literature. The book is the work of Imre Kertész, who was deported from Budapest at fourteen, passed through Auschwitz and Buchenwald and the satellite camp of Zeitz, and was liberated at fourteen and a half. He spent the next thirty years working as a translator from German under the Hungarian communist regime. The book took ten years to write and another ten years to find a publisher. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002.
The book follows a Budapest Jewish boy of fourteen and a half, named György Köves, from his last day before deportation through Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Zeitz to liberation and his return to Budapest. The narration is in the boy’s voice and stays inside the boy’s experience throughout. The boy does not know what is going to happen on the next page. The reader does. The gap between the boy’s understanding and the reader’s understanding produces the book’s central tension and the book’s argument.
The argument is that the catastrophe is not, on the inside, what it looks like from the outside. The standard postwar Holocaust novel presents the camp as Hell and the prisoner as a sufferer with a clear moral consciousness of where they are and what is happening. Kertész refuses this. The boy in the book observes the camp as a series of small puzzling routines, hours of daylight, weather, hunger, the smell of the chimneys at the end of the camp’s long street, the small kindnesses and the small cruelties of the kapos and the SS guards. He notices the beauty of the sky at evening. He notices that, in conditions of extreme deprivation, even the worst day has its small good moments. The boy survives because he has learned to attend to the routine and to find, inside it, something to hold to. The Hungarian word in the book, kis lépcső, the small step, is the unit of his survival.
The boy returns to Budapest at the end of the war. The neighbours and old acquaintances ask him about Hell, about the horror, about the unimaginable suffering. He cannot answer them in those terms. He starts to explain that the camp had its hours, its small routines, its boring middle parts, that he had even, at moments, been almost happy. The neighbours stop him. They tell him what he should have felt. The boy realises, at the end of the book, that the postwar audience is no more capable of receiving the truth of the camp than the camp inmates had been capable, on arrival, of guessing what was about to happen to them. The catastrophe is doubled. The first time was the camp. The second time is the world’s refusal, or inability, to hear what the camp had been like.
The book was rejected by Hungarian publishers for ten years on the grounds that it was, in their phrase, perverse. The standard postwar Holocaust narrative was about the survival of the human spirit. Kertész’s book was about the death of the human spirit and its replacement by something else, smaller and stranger, that he called fatelessness, the refusal of the survivor to accept the standard narratives of victimhood, redemption, witness or heroism. The boy at the end of the book has been through Auschwitz and has refused all the available roles. He is the most difficult character in the postwar literature.
The book was finally published by the Hungarian state house Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó in 1975 in a small print run of around fifteen hundred copies. It was largely ignored. The translation into German in 1996 by Christina Virágh, retitled Roman eines Schicksallosen, opened the European reception. The book reached the English-speaking world in fits and starts, with two competing translations, the second by Tim Wilkinson in 2004 supplanting the first. The Nobel Prize citation in 2002 brought the book to the wider public.
The book was filmed in 2005 by the Hungarian director Lajos Koltai with a screenplay by Kertész. The film, with music by Ennio Morricone, was the most expensive Hungarian film ever made up to that point. The film softens the book somewhat, making the boy’s redemption visible in a way the book carefully refuses. Kertész was open about his ambivalence with the film. The book, he said, was the version that mattered.
Anyone who comes to the Holocaust literature through Levi, Wiesel and Frank should read Kertész next. The earlier books are the books that built the genre. Kertész is the book that takes the genre apart from inside.
See also
Sources
- Imre Kertész, Sorstalanság, Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1975
- Imre Kertész, Fatelessness, translated by Tim Wilkinson, Vintage, 2004
- Imre Kertész, Roman eines Schicksallosen, translated by Christina Virágh, Rowohlt, 1996
- Imre Kertész, Nobel Lecture, 2002
- Adam Kirsch, profile of Kertész, The New Republic, 2003
- Lajos Koltai, director, Sorstalanság, 2005