Fatelessness by Imre Kertész (1975)

György Köves narrates Auschwitz the way another boy might narrate a first week at a new school: he learns the timetable, masters the work, sizes up the company, and registers each fresh deprivation as simply the next reasonable thing. He is fourteen. Imre Kertész was the same age when he was deported along that same route, and his novel rests on the most disturbing truth he carried home: that a person does not experience his own destruction all at once but absorbs it by degrees, each new horror settling quietly into a revised sense of the ordinary. So the boy, in the lulls between the day's torments, comes to know something he can only call happiness. The voice never rises, and that flatness is the whole argument. _Fatelessness_ withholds the comfort of outrage and offers instead a child telling it precisely as it was, refusing to perform for anyone the suffering they expect to hear.