IN CASE IT SHOULD BE forgotten, Imre Kertész won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. That was for a body of work, but this novel, Fatelessness, as it is now called in its second English translation, lay at the root of it.

There is a second translation now because the first to appear was graceless and was published only in the United States, and the Kertész book that followed it, Kaddish for a Child Not Yet Born, was almost unreadable. This meant that Kertész remained more or less unknown in the English- speaking world and the awarding of the prize came rather out of the blue for Anglophone readers.

That he was the first Hungarian winner came as a surprise even to some right-wing Hungarians, who felt it was a shame that it should go to a Jew, furthermore a Jew whose central character in Fatelessness responds to a comment to the effect that the speaker does not like Hungarians by reflecting, “. . . all things considered, I myself would find it hard to find much reason to like them”.

It should be borne in mind, of course, that the speaker is Gyuri Köves, a 16-year-old survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, much like Kertész himself. Gyuri is the son of entirely secularised Jewish parents, living with his father and step-mother, his natural mother having left. He speaks no Hebrew. Like many Hungarians and other Central Europeans between the wars, his family believe themselves successfully assimilated. Jewishness is elsewhere for Gyuri.

We pick up the story where his father has just been called away to labour camp, leaving the then 15-year-old boy with the responsibilities of adulthood. The yellow star is already being worn. It’s the summer of 1944. Father disappears. Step by step (a metaphor he will use to great effect at the end) Gyuri is first detailed for labour himself in a part of Budapest, then, without warning, taken off the bus taking him to work, herded into a brickyard, put on a train and taken to Auschwitz, where he lies about his age, thereby unwittingly saving himself. He is then transferred to Buchenwald, then Zeitz. He works hard, tries to be a solid citizen, but eventually loses strength and almost dies just as the war is coming to an end, so is nursed back to some kind of health until the Americans arrive, when he is sent home to Budapest to meet the survivors and the uncomprehending others.

If the story were all, it would be familiar enough in its way. We know the kind of thing that happened. The greatness is not in the events but in the tracing of consciousness. This consciousness is not a normal literary construction: it is a kind of semi-consciousness full of apologetic ironies and qualifications that serve to counterpoint the terrible reality that not only becomes normality, but, the boy comes to consider, is the true face of normality.

The tone of voice, Gyuri’s voice, is, we come to accept, the voice of truth without it ever appearing to make any such claim. Events are registered, dreamt and suffered through, step by step. The tenacious grip on this normality — the realisation that horror is natural, not freakish — is constantly struggling against the cliché of what can be said about it. So the well-meaning journalist who wants to tell Gyuri’s story in terms of hell at the end is unwittingly a corrupter of experience, and, decent as the man is, Gyuri throws his business card away.

There is no depth of degradation or cruelty that human beings will not undertake and normalise, he feels. There are even moments of happiness in the suffering. It is the moments of happiness that mark the experience for Gyuri. It is the same moments that mark it in tragic terms for us, though tragedy is not quite the right word. Gyuri’s words are more precise and more honest than that. The tragedy is in our reading. The coincidence between author and central character is a device that suspends the book between two categories, fiction and memoir. In fact it is neither of these things. It is, rather, an attempt to find a genre that is appropriate to the experience being dealt with. That is where its greatness lies.

It is greatly to Tim Wilkinson’s credit that this work, which ought to stand beside Primo Levi’s If This is a Man, remains compulsive throughout, so, after a while, we forget we are reading a translation. It is the 15-year-old boy we hear, as he grows into an ancient old man of 16.

translated by Tim Wilkinson Harvill, £14.99; 262pp
£11.69 (free p&p)
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