By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Fatelessness: something that had never been written about
Lajos Koltai‘s adaptation of fellow Hungarian, Nobelist Imre Kertész‘s first novel, Fateless, about a feckless boyhood in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, is one of the year’s most criminally underappreciated in the U.S.. (For instance, Roger Ebert did not review it.) Kertész talks to the Guardian’s Julian Evans about inspiration and other matters. “He does not discuss the details of his adaptation to peacetime and adulthood. [Kertész] has the profound charm and good humour of those who have seen life at its vilest and most absurd, but the disturbed pattern of his early years is painfully clear. Having found his life again, he felt he was losing it. “To my horror, I realised that 10 years after I had returned from the Nazi camps… all that remained of the experience were a few muddled impressions, a few anecdotes.” He was adrift into the 1950s. “What happened was that I got so deeply involved in these dictatorships, I was beginning to get lost in them. First, I had to recognise that I was stepping out of line, out of line with the masses.” He began to write “pieces of text and then more pieces of text. This was not the novel as you know it, but I tried to create a summary or a description of dictatorship.”… “[O]n a lovely spring day in 1955”, he realised there was only one reality, himself, his own life, “this fragile gift bestowed for an uncertain time, which had been seized, expro-priated by alien forces … and which I had to take back from ‘History’, this dreadful Moloch, because it was mine and mine alone.” … An advantage of conditions in Hungary was that “all the circumstances were there for you to become a cryptowriter, a hidden writer, because it was a cheap way of life, the outgoings were low, the cost of maintenance was low, there were no status symbols to wish for, and it was a reduced way of life and you could concentrate on your work” … “[I wanted] to write a scandalous book, a scandalous piece of text, some-thing that had never been written about before.”