Dispassionate survival in a 'beautiful concentration camp'

Fiction: Having spent a year in Auschwitz, Buchenwald and a smaller camp called Zeitz, the teenage boy narrator of Imre Kertész's autobiographical novel, Fatelessness, is asked by a journalist to describe "the hell of the camps".

The narrator carefully recalls his reply: "I remarked that I had nothing at all to say about that as I was not acquainted with hell and couldn't even imagine what that was like." This exchange occurs near the close of this chilling, bizarre and courageous work. By this point the reader has come to expect the level of control with which the narrator lives - and has survived. Too aloof for self-pity, he has used his detachment well. Instead of confiding, he reports. He is a witness, never a victim; his narrative is detailed, formal and exact. There is no speculation, no hysteria and an apparent a lack of outrage.

The journalist persists in wanting to hear the boy's story, and plans a series of articles. He tears a page from his notebook and gives the boy his address at the newspaper. "Waiting only until his figure had disappeared into the swarm of passers-by," the narrator reports, "I tossed the slip of paper away."

Objective, accurate and remote, the boy narrator, Gyuri, begins his account in the deliberate tone he sustains throughout: "I didn't go to school today. Or rather, I did go, but only to ask my class teacher's permission to take the day off."

He needs to return to the family shop, where his father is waiting. His family are Jews living in Budapest under the race restrictions imposed by the Nazis.

It is time to hand over the family timber business to the store manager. He will protect it. This seems a good plan. On the way to the shop the narrator is conscious of the warmth of the day. "I was about to unbutton myself but then had second thoughts: it was possible that, light as the head breeze was, my coat lapel might flap back and cover up my yellow star, which would not have been in conformity with the regulations."

Fatelessness, first published in Hungary in 1975, some 30 years after the events it describes, waited a further 30 years for this English translation. The sheer pragmatism of the telling make it both compelling and off-putting. You wonder at the boy's curiosity, his lack of fear and dread, and his apparent acceptance of the "steps" by which everything happens. He seems oddly neutral. But then this is a boy who has stood back and watched as his stepmother moved in and took over the role of mother after his parents divorced. His mother continued to live nearby, ever viewed with suspicion by the boy's father.

Kertész won the 2002 Nobel Prize for literature largely on the strength of this novel and two linked successors. It deserves its place in the canon of Holocaust literature. More memoir than novel, it is presented as an adventure rather than an indictment. One of the strongest impressions it creates is the narrator's distance from his fellow Jews. He is a natural outsider. Some two months after his father leaves for "labour service" the boy is informed he has been assigned to a "permanent workplace". This new routine is soon disrupted when he is detained and herded on to a train. The journey ends in early morning sunlight. From the carriage, he notices a place name: Auschwitz-Birkenau. "For my own part, though, I cast around my geographical knowledge in vain and quickly dropped off to sleep again." Everything we now know about life in the concentration camps is detailed here: the lack of water, the foul food, the sensation of absolute hunger.

The narrator presents suffering as an academic exercise. "At the very beginning, I still considered myself to be what I might call a sort of guest in captivity . . ." He remembers throwing away a stew he found inedible and then, feeling angry that there was no water, rages: "don't say we'll have to go thirsty again after all this, just like on the train." Thirst and hunger then yield to an awareness of the smell, "sweetish and somehow cloying, with a whiff of the now familiar chemical in it as well", and he notes the nearby chimney. On being moved on to Buchenwald, he becomes conscious of being herded by soldiers, not fellow prisoners.

The narrator's cool intelligence shapes the book. It proves an intimidating and challenging experience. "Close to our camp, I learned, lies the culturally celebrated city of Weimar." It was here, he reports, that Goethe lived. Within the area of the camp, we are told, "marked with a commemorative plaque and protected from us prisoners by a fence, is a now nobly spreading tree he planted with his own hand". Although the narrator's belief that he will go home remains strong, he does record the appalling disintegration of his young body. An oozing leg wound brings him into contact with the hospital units. Despite his refusal to complain, it does come as a shock when he announces: "I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp." Kertész has written a strange, subtle work quite unlike any other Holocaust narrative in its pragmatic, dispassionate tone.

It is a survivor's tale suspended between wonder and curiosity undercut by an ambivalence that offers no answers.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Fatelessness By Imre Kertész, translated by Tim Wilkinson. Harvill, 262pp. £14.99