Struggling to find an appropriate and thoughtful way of approaching Imre Kertész’s first-person narrative, the novel Fateless, I am reminded of my initial response to it - an unnerving mixture of wonder, stupor and too-powerful-for-words excitement, both to the novel’s content and the writer’s knack for imaginative reportage. I am lost for words, mostly because I am embarrassed to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the understated humor of Kertész’s fifteen-year-old narrator as he recounts for the readers the malaise of the everyday banality of the concentration camp system, reflecting on this particular nature of elemental survival as the far more “memorable” one than the impossibly difficult juggling-act of the survivor’s return and integration within the “normalicy” of a “liberated” society.
What has made my sensibilities more susceptible to Kertész’s style lies perhaps in the temptingly unsettling quality of his narrator’s language(s); the physical reality of the camp life is constantly juxtaposed to the recollected memories of his previous, pre-camp existence with a keen sense for textual cinematic purity. The voice of the young George Koves negotiates for his audience a space in between, that is to say, the niche of life that we all strive to claim, our untempered with, intact private self, as he engages our participation within the story of his growing up amidst devastation and human carnage, unfolding step by step the gradual events of his interrupted young adulthood. Yet, to say that we fully identify with his experiences would be to miss the mark; we are historically removed from the events surrounding the Holocaust and the post-World War II communist driven realities. However, Imre Kertész’s narrative technique flirts with the idea of a common ground. By creating a textual artifact whose language abridges the powerful dismissal of moral responsibility and guilty conscience surrounding the events of the Holocaust and the Gulag, in a way, Kertész allows for these events to finally have a homeland, even though it is one existing in the realm of literary (non)-fiction. Thus, when we encounter the on-the-surface ubiquity of Kertész’s final lines, we should not fail to recognize their telling simplicity: life is a series of events, whose acknowledgement in their entirety is the first step towards mutual understanding and fateful existence.
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