Fateless

I feel a bit guilty about this, but I wasn’t that keen on Fateless.  It seems as though books about the Holocaust and concentration camps, especially those written by survivors should have a sense of gravitas that’s appreciated by all, even if you don’t actually enjoy reading about it.  I want to blame the fact that I basically read this book in my lunch breaks and write it off as just being in the wrong mind set to read serious literature in the thirty or so minutes a day I have to relax at the office.  It’s not that though.  Imre Kertész says part of the way through that he was surprised to find himself bored by his time in Auschwitz.  I feel much the same way.

And it is just the concentration camp bits that I couldn’t get into.  There are sections before and after Gyuri’s stay in Buchenwald that are really interesting.  The train journey between the camps and the missed reunion with his family are so good.  Or well written.  And there are other parts, I concede, that are fascinating.  There’s a running obsession with prisoner numbers.  Those with numbers in the hundreds or early thousands have a near celebrity status, there’s even an incident when we meet someone with an elusive two digit prisoner number.

Part of it, I think, is simply my being thrown.  We are taught that the Holocaust was a terrible thing and those in concentration camps suffered unimaginable horrors.  So, when these horrors are described as every day and mundane, it’s hard to know how to take it.  I feel like the journalist who appears near the end of the book; insisting that it must have been horrific and wanting that to be exploited while Kertész patiently explains that even suffering, when spread over a long enough period of time, becomes common place.  The issue with the common place is that it doesn’t exactly make for a thrilling read.  Likewise, it’s hard to get excited by entire paragraphs dedicated to comparisons of soup and bread rations between concentration camps.

It’s difficult because I’m aware that I’m finding excuses for not liking Fateless partially due to the subject matter.  It the story was about fictional suffering, I’d be so much quicker to write the book off.  But I have this niggling feeling that it’s probably just not socially acceptable to admit to finding the experiences of a real life concentration camp survivor tedious.  Even if that’s exactly how Kertész is going out of his way to present said experiences.  See what I mean about wanting there to be more suffering?  I’m a bit concerned that rather than a lack of anything in the novel itself it’s rather me that’s wanting for something, and that’s the crux of my unrest.  I’m just sort of worried I may have missed the point of the book altogether. 

Next up is Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye.  Swing by again soon.