Kertész's Fatelessness Reading Order

Imre Kertész's Fatelessness (Sorstalanság, 1975) — published as Fateless in one English translation and Fatelessness in another — is one of the most important Holocaust novels ever written and one of the strangest: narrated by Gyuri Köves, a fourteen-year-old Hungarian Jewish boy who is transported to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald without fully understanding what is happening to him, in a prose of deliberate flatness and observational precision that refuses conventional horror. Kertész wrote the novel between 1960 and 1973, drawing on his own experiences — he was deported at fourteen and survived Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Zeitz — and his central formal decision was to narrate the experience without retrospective knowledge: Gyuri does not know what Auschwitz is when he arrives, does not fully understand the gas chambers, and narrates his experience with the curious detachment of a child who is making sense of things as they happen rather than as history has taught us to understand them. The result is profoundly disturbing precisely because it refuses to be disturbing in the expected ways: Gyuri's deadpan observations about the organization of camp life, his small pleasures and accommodations, convey the horror of normalization more effectively than any conventional account. Kertész won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002.