Quote by Imre Kertész: “There is no such condition as absolute happiness or absolute misery.”

Even in the worst circumstances imaginable, the human capacity for small moments of relief persists. Even in the best, shadows appear. Kertész — a Holocaust survivor — is not minimizing suffering; he is observing that humans adapt to extreme conditions in ways that resist simple descriptions. Experience is always more complicated than categories.

Fatelessness was first published in 1975 in Hungary, where it was largely ignored. The novel is narrated by a boy who describes his time in the Nazi camps with an unsettling matter-of-factness, refusing the dramatic frameworks through which such experiences were usually mediated. It was not until after the fall of communism that the book received the attention it deserved.

Hungarian novelist and Holocaust survivor who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002. His novel Fatelessness, based on his experiences as a teenage prisoner in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, is considered one of the most important literary responses to the Holocaust. He argued that the Holocaust was not an aberration but a product of modernity.