Mapped
Fatelessness
Imre Kertész
In 1944 the fourteen-year-old Budapest Jew György Köves is pulled off a bus, deported, and survives Auschwitz, Buchenwald and the Zeitz labour camp with a bewildered, matter-of-fact detachment, before returning to a city that wants him to forget. Kertész, who lived it, maps the real geography of the catastrophe: the yellow-star house and the assembly points of Budapest, and the camps to the north where a boy learns to take each step of the machinery as, somehow, natural.
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Fatelessness
Imre Kertész
The wartime Budapest of a fifteen-year-old boy who is marked, taken and deported in the summer of 1944. The map holds the ordinary points of his last free weeks, a Pest flat, an apprentice job across the river at Csepel, and the brickyard on the northern edge where a stopped bus ends the ordinary. From there the novel travels out of the frame to the camps and, at the last, returns to a city that has changed while he was gone.
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