Roman eines Schicksallosen Add a review

Fateless or Fatelessness (Hungarian: Sorstalanság, lit. 'Fatelessness') is the first novel by Imre Kertész, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for literature. He began writing it in the 1960 but it was rejected for publication by the Communist regime in Hungary. It was finally published in 1975.

The novel is considered a quasi-autobiographical story about a 14-year-old Hungarian Jew's experiences in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, as Kertesz was sent to Auschwitz at this age, after the Nazi's entered Budapest in March 1944.

The book is the first part of a trilogy, which continues the story of György Köves, as he grows older. In A kudarc ("Fiasco" ISBN 0-8101-1161-6) he has survived the camps and tries to deal with post-war Hungary; in Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért ("Kaddish for an Unborn Child" ISBN 1-4000-7862-8) he explains how it is that he cannot bring himself to bring a child into a world capable of such atrocities.

Kertész won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history", and how one deals with his survivor after knowing so many who died. one can handle surviving when so many other people died. This literary concept is called “witness literature”, describing trauma from personal experience.

The book was first translated into English by Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson in 1992 as Fateless (ISBN 0-8101-1049-0 and ISBN 0-8101-1024-5), while in 2004 a second translation by Tim Wilkinson appeared (ISBN 1-4000-7863-6) under the title Fatelessness. In the UK edition, Wilkinson's translation retained the title Fatelessness (ISBN 978-1-784-87215-1).