Years ago when I read Fateless—a Holocaust novel by Imre Kertesz—I was floored by its brilliance. “Kertesz’s spare, understated prose and the almost ironic perspective of Gyorgy Köves, limited both by his youth and his inability to perceive the enormity of what he is caught up in, give the novel an intensity that [makes] it difficult to forget.” Kertesz won the Nobel Prize in 2002 (read his acceptance lecture) “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history”:

In his writing Imre Kertész explores the possibility of continuing to live and think as an individual in an era in which the subjection of human beings to social forces has become increasingly complete. His works return unremittingly to the decisive event in his life: the period spent in Auschwitz, to which he was taken as a teenage boy during the Nazi persecution of Hungary’s Jews. For him Auschwitz is not an exceptional occurrence that like an alien body subsists outside the normal history of Western Europe. It is the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern existence.

Kertész’s first novel, Sorstalanság, 1975 (Fateless, 1992), deals with the young Köves, who is arrested and taken to a concentration camp but conforms and survives. The novel uses the alienating device of taking the reality of the camp completely for granted, an everyday existence like any other, admittedly with conditions that are thankless, but not without moments of happiness. Köves regards events like a child without completely understanding them and without finding them unnatural or disquieting – he lacks our ready-made answers. The shocking credibility of the description derives perhaps from this very absence of any element of the moral indignation or metaphysical protest that the subject cries out for. The reader is confronted not only with the cruelty of atrocities but just as much with the thoughtlessness that characterised their execution. Both perpetrators and victims were preoccupied with insistent practical problems, the major questions did not exist. Kertész’s message is that to live is to conform. The capacity of the captives to come to terms with Auschwitz is one outcome of the same principle that finds expression in everyday human coexistence.

More here. I discovered today that a movie based on Fateless came out in 2006 when I was in India (now in my Netflix queue).