More on Imre Kertesz

I feel like I have been doing a lot of repeating recently, but I finally finished reading "Fatelessness", which I wrote about last month after seeing the movie version in a preview at the DC Jewish film festival. The movie clearly does justice to the book.

But until I read the book, I did not know why it was said that it would be so difficult to film. The reason is that the book (the semi-autobiographical story of a 15 year old Jewish Budapest boy who spent a year in German prison camps at the end of World War II) is as much philosophy as it is narrative or drama. It is an odd book, in that it is written (at some indefinite time) in the first person, as the protagonist looks back at the prison camps and his reactions to being held. What is unclear is his age at writing, because the ruminations are very erudite and mature, yet the writing is about an adolescent and has not hint of what happened after the war. In other words, it does not appear that the narrator is drawing on any later experience. I found this juxtoposition of vantage point unsettling.

I have read nothing else of Nobel winner Kertesz, so should keep quiet for now beyond what I have said. As to the book that I felt reminded of when reading "Fatelessness", it was none of the other Holocaust narratives that I have read, except for Viktor Frankl's classic psychological self-study, "Man's Search for Meaning". A quick internet search does not lead to me to any article comparing that two. Perhaps if I were a little more serious and re-looked at Frankl, I would see why I was the only one making this comparison.