Fatelessness

At the age of fourteen, Gyorgy 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, Gyorgy 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 Gyorgy'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.

About the Author :
Imre Kertesz (1929-2016) was born in Budapest. Of Jewish descent, he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, at the age of fourteen, and from there to Buchenwald, where he was liberated in 1945. On his return to Hungary, he worked for a Budapest newspaper but was dismissed in 1951 when it adopted the Communist party line. After two years of military service he began supporting himself as an independent writer and translator. Kertesz was awarded many literary prizes during his career as an author, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he received in 2002. His works have been translated into numerous languages, including German, Spanish, French, English, Czech, Russian, Swedish, and Hebrew. Josh Bloomberg, an Earphones Award-winning narrator, is a trained professional actor with extensive audiobook experience as a director and narrator. Having worked with some of the biggest publishers in the audiobook industry, he is used to performing at high standards. He speaks English, French, and Hebrew fluently and is a member of the Audio Publishers Association. He also records his voice for commercial spots and other types of voice-over. In his spare time, he loves making homemade almond milk.

Review :
[Kertesz] upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history. -- "Swedish Academy" A superb, haunting novel...Kertesz's spare, understated prose and the almost ironic perspective of Gyorgy, limited both by his youth and his inability to perceive the enormity of what he is caught up in, give the novel an intensity that will make it difficult to forget. One learns something of concentration camp life here, even while becoming convinced that one cannot understand that life at all-not the way Kertesz does. -- "Publishers Weekly" Remarkable...An original and chilling quality, surpassed only by Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz. -- "New York Review of Books" Should be savored slowly...Only through exploring its subtlety and detail will the reader come to appreciate such an ornate and honest testimony to the human spirit. -- "Washington Times"