num_pages: 262
description: At the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew.” In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, Georg remains an outsider.The genius of Imre Kertesz’s unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the strangeness of its events, not least of which is Georg’s dogmatic insistence on making sense of what he witnesses–or pretending that what he witnesses makes sense. Haunting, evocative, and all the more horrifying for its rigorous avoidance of sentiment, Fatelessness is a masterpiece in the traditions of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski.
language: English
title: Fatelessness
titlecomplete: Fatelessness
characters: Köves  György
genres: Classics, World War II, Novels, Hungarian Literature, Holocaust, Nobel Prize, Hungary, War, Historical Fiction, Fiction
ratings_count: 11206
places: Auschwitz, Budapest, Buchenwald, Wille
series: The Holocaust
awards: awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
category: Shortlist, awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: PEN Translation Prize
category: Tim Wilkinson, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize, awardedAt: 852105600000
name: Leipzig Book Award
category: European Understanding
publisher: Vintage International