Nobels: 2002: Imre Kertész

A writer of whom I am sure I had never heard before, Imre Kertész was and wrote in Hungarian. As far as I can tell this book, Fateless, fairly closely follows his own history. A secular Jew in Hungary as the Second World War was nearing its end, he was taken away one day to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald. The book describes the treatment a similar boy, Gyuri, received in the camps and his final liberation in 1945.

It's a sparsely-told account. Gyuri is deadpan, with a touch of autism about him in the way he affectlessly describes what happens and strives to discern some logic in it. Ultimately, and especially in the final chapter after his return to Budapest, Gyuri is making the case that life stories aren't demonstrations of fate or destiny at work, but are just sequences of events. (The original title, Sorstalanság, means fatelessness, which gives a better sense of the rejection of implied meaning in narrative.) Whether we can assume that the book is saying that the holocaust has made meaningful narrative obsolete is another question.

Unusually, with this book I noticed the typeface. It's not typical of faces used for novels and is more reminiscent of, say, French poetry. Here's a sample. It's a smart choice by the publisher: it suggests a coolness that's inherent in the text.

This was a good, enthralling read, something that I would never have picked up but for the project I've undertaken and I'm so glad to have read it.

Next up is the longest book I've tackled here so far. I'm already disposed against it for that reason, and it may be some time before you find out what it is and whether I overcome my bias.