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. 

Imre Kertesz’s unblink­ing nov­el refue­ses 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.