Kertész's Fatelessness

About Fatelessness

Imre Kertész (1929–2016) was a Hungarian-Jewish novelist and Holocaust survivor who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002 — the first Hungarian writer to win the prize — and whose work is one of the most formally distinctive contributions to Holocaust literature. Born in Budapest, he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 at fourteen and survived Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and the labor camp at Zeitz before liberation. Working as a journalist and translator under communist rule, he wrote Fatelessness (Sorstalanság) between 1960 and 1973; published in 1975, it was initially ignored and then rediscovered after 1989. Its central formal innovation is to narrate the Holocaust through a narrator who doesn't know what Auschwitz is when he arrives — whose deadpan observational prose refuses retrospective horror and conveys the horror of normalization instead. Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990) and The Failure (1988) constitute the Fatelessness trilogy; Liquidation (2003) and Fiasco (1988) extend his autobiographical-fictional project. He spent his later years in Berlin, which he found more congenial than Budapest for examining the German catastrophe that had shaped his life.