'There is an hour of the day which falls between returning from the factory and the evening Appell, a distinctive, always bustling and liberated hour that I, for my part, always looked forward to and enjoyed the most while in the Lager; as it happened, this was generally also suppertime.' This is the voice of Gyuri, a 14-year-old boy from a Jewish family in Budapest, remembering life in a German concentration camp in the summer of 1944. It is also the voice of Imre Kertész. His own experiences in the camps gave rise to his masterpiece, a novel whose utter originality sets it apart from all other writing about the Holocaust. Fateless, which won Kertész the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, is not - he has said - an autobiography, but 'uses the form of an autobiographical novel'.

LRB 3 August 2006 | PDF Download