He, however, first sent the bus on its way with a brisk flip of the hand. Without a word being said, I immediately held out my pass toward him. Indeed, on the highway I found myself face-to-face with a policeman.

Ah well, I thought to myself, no doubt they want to do a spot-check on the papers of everyone going across. The novel is a semi-autobiographical story about a 14-year-old Hungarian Jew 's experiences in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. ly, and then I heard from outside snatches of a voice issuing orders, which the conductor and several passengers relayed on down to me, to the effect that any Jewish passenger who happened to be on the bus should get off. 'Fatelessness') is a novel by Imre Kertsz, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for literature, written between 19 and first published in 1975. We had already left the houses of the suburbs behind and driven across the short, unornamented bridge that crosses to Csepel Island, after which the road carries on through open country for a stretch, between fields with, over on the left, a flat, hangarlike building and, over on the right, the scattered greenhouses of market gardeners, when the bus braked very sudden. It promised to be a hot day, and as ever the bus was packed with passengers. Fatelessness by Imre Kertsz, translated by Tim Wilkinson 272pp, Harvill Press, 14.99 Fatelessness, first published in Hungary in 1975, is an autobiographical novel by Imre Kertsz that. There was no sign of open resistance against the system. Hungary was opening up to the West as the shop window of the Soviet Bloc. This was the peak of the golden age of socialism. I got up that morning and set off for work as usual. Kertsz wrote his debut novel, Fatelessness in the years between 19, and it was first published in 1975 in Hungary. The child’s lack of hindsight or foresight eventually helps him survive. I was stunned by the novel’s narrative voicecompletely devoid of judgement. To quickly assess the difficulty of the text, read a short excerpt: Evaluation is non-existent in Imre Kertsz’s auto-biographical novel, Fatelessness, which is about a fourteen-year-old Hungarian boy, Gyuri, who is taken to Auschwitz.

Fatelessness by Imre Kertész