Fatelessness
Imre Kertész(1975)
Extract
Even there, next to the chimneys, in the intervals between the torments, there was something that resembled happiness.
A fourteen-year-old boy boards a bus in Budapest one morning and is taken, with a calm the reader finds unbearable, through the entire machinery of the Holocaust: the cattle cars, the selections, the camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Published in 1975, drawn from the author's own deportation at fourteen, the novel's devastating originality lies in its refusal of retrospective horror. The boy experiences each stage with a logic that accepts what is happening because it is happening, finding even in the camps moments of boredom, small pleasures, and strange beauty. The prose does not protest or explain. It simply records a consciousness adapting to the unthinkable, revealing something about human nature more disturbing than any accusation.
If you loved this
Levi writes from the same camps with the same clear gaze, but as testimony where Kertész writes as literature.
Camus writes another man moving through catastrophe with the same strange detachment, and the world makes just as little sense.
Frank writes before the camps Kertész survives, and the innocence is what makes both accounts unbearable.