Fatelessness: A Novel
About this audiobook
At the age of fourteen, György Köves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and, without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew.” In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, György remains an outsider.
The genius of Imre Kertész’s unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the strangeness of its events—not least of which is György’s dogmatic insistence on making sense of what he witnesses, or pretending that what he witnesses makes sense. Haunting, evocative, and all the more horrifying for its rigorous avoidance of sentiment, Fatelessness is a masterpiece in the traditions of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski.
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About the author
Imre Kertész (1929–2016) was born in Budapest. Of Jewish descent, he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, at the age of fourteen, and from there to Buchenwald, where he was liberated in 1945. On his return to Hungary, he worked for a Budapest newspaper but was dismissed in 1951 when it adopted the Communist party line. After two years of military service he began supporting himself as an independent writer and translator. Kertész was awarded many literary prizes during his career as an author, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he received in 2002. His works have been translated into numerous languages, including German, Spanish, French, English, Czech, Russian, Swedish, and Hebrew.
Josh Bloomberg, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, is a trained professional actor with extensive audiobook experience as a director and narrator. Having worked with some of the biggest publishers in the audiobook industry, he is used to performing at high standards. He speaks English, French, and Hebrew fluently and is a member of the Audio Publishers Association. He also records his voice for commercial spots and other types of voice-over. In his spare time, he loves making homemade almond milk.
