Reading 1001 discussion

Rating: 4+ stars
Read: June 2017

Fatelessness is a semi-autobiographical novel about the experiences of a teenage boy during the Holocaust. He is sent away to a series of concentration camps, but does not really understand why or fully comprehend what is happening. He spends the book coming to terms with his fate. He seems to view his experiences with a sense of detachment, as though he is viewing them from the outside. He feels alienated from his fellow inmates since he doesn't really identify with the culture, religious practices, and language of the others. Some of the fellow prisoners don't consider him to be Jewish enough (or at all). This book seemed different from most Holocaust accounts in that it focused on a lot of the day to day events rather on the larger atrocities.

Not an easy subject to read about, but definitely a book that everyone should read.

Diane wrote: "Rating: 4+ stars
Read: June 2017

Fatelessness is a semi-autobiographical novel about the experiences of a teenage boy during the Holocaust. He is sent away to a series of concentration camps, but ..."

This was a good book. We read it as a group a few years back and I think everyone was impressed. There is also a movie if you are interested.

Diane wrote: "Diane wrote: "Rating: 4+ stars
Read: June 2017

Fatelessness is a semi-autobiographical novel about the experiences of a teenage boy during the Holocaust. He is sent away to a series of concentrati..."

Oh, wow, I didn't realize there was a movie. I would love to see it.

In this novel a teenage boy who is “not really Jewish” is sent to concentration camps one year before liberation, and barely survives.
Told in a first-person, rambling, almost stream-of-consciousness style very different from the more usual journalistic style.
It was an effort to follow his thoughts at times, and it's not the best novel about the holocaust (that may be The Pianist, or Schindler's List if you consider that to be a novel) but certainly worth reading.
Three and a half stars.

I saw the film (titled "Fateless") about 10 years ago and rated it four stars. I don't remember it very well now, though. I see it has a 94% positive rating from critics on RottenTomatoes.

The novel reflects the real experiences of the author who was sent to Auschwitz and Buchenwald when he was in his teens. It also uniquely reflects the mind of a teenager who does not have the experience to compare and contrast what is happening to him to a "natural" life. Throughout the book, György, our main character, adjusts his viewpoint to accommodate all that is happening around him in order to make it both understandable but also livable. One gets the impression that if György saw what was happening to him as true torture and cruelty he would have given up living earlier than he did. Instead he just lived the fate that was handed to him and because everything proceeded in an orderly way, one day at a time, one moment at a time, he had time to adjust and persevere. Unlike other books about the holocaust or the concentration camps, the author does not talk about the atrocities in a personal way but in a very detached way. This detachment perfectly achieves the sense of dehumanization that happens to those in the camps. Only at the end of the book does our main character talk about "hatred" but his hatred is not aimed at the Nazi or the collaborators in the camps but at everyone. Everyone that made it happen, everyone that let it happen and everyone that lived through it and allowed it to happen to them.
Kertész, the author, wrote the book decades after his experiences and yet clearly the detached musing of the main teenaged character still were alive within for him to be able to capture so clearly the dehumanization and estrangement of György.

Read in 2016

Stories about war and the holocaust are always heartbreaking but told from the perspective of a teenager makes it even more so. “I gazed around too, but only for the fun of it, let's say, for after all, I couldn't see any other reason for trying to escape.” Oh the innocence of youth, I appreciated reading this through his young eyes. “This is when I found out that you could be bored even in Auschwitz...” I am very glad that I read this story about George, a Hungarian Jew who survived the concentration camps. It is a story that ponders fate versus freedom. “But who can judge what is possible or believable in a concentration camp?” I recommend this book.