Knowing less, knowing more

Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz

Since I finished the book Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz, I can’t get out of my head the question: Is Gyuri Koves an unreliable narrator, or we are unreliable readers?

The story is about a Jewish boy, who grows up in the world of concentrations camps. The stress is on growing up, because Gyuri is a young boy when the book starts, he is only 14-15 years old, and knows almost nothing about standards, customs, the relationships between people, the way living together, etc. It’s like a Bildungsroman, a young and naive someone learns the most important things about the society to became a real member of it. But it must be a grotesque Bildungsroman: Gyuri learns the standards of a lager. It’s incredible, how many times he says: I have understood… , it’s natural…, it’s logic…

It’s incredible for us readers, because we don’t know what to do with this attitude. We know a lot of thing about Auschwitz or Buchenwald, what Gyuri doesn’t know. But he knows a lot of thing about it what we don’t know.

And that is the main point of my train of thought. Is it about knowing less and knowing more? Or just about the different point of views.

Who is unreliable? The narrator who doesn’t know what is a lager for and wants to understand and wants to learn it’s customs, and doesn’t understand why the others think at the end of the story, that it is something horrible? Or we readers, who know only this point of view: it is something incredible bad, and don’t understand, why Gyuri can’t see it from the first moment he arrives in Auschwitz.

Review: In the shadow of a despotic father

Ondrok gödre by Imre Oravecz

(published:2007; Jelenkor)

Living in a village in the middle of the country at the end of the 19.century.

Living in the village Szajla and being a part of a wealthy peasant family, the Arvais. It’ s a small world about we can read, only some characters, mostly from this family, and the two opposite characters are father and son: Janos Arvai, and Istvan Arvai.

Janos is a strongand clever man, someone, who’s property is growing and growing, he is always tries out something new, and he works really-really hard… but he is also a despot, he wants his family member, his children be the same perfect someone as him.

Istvan is his eldest son, we can see how he grows up, how he starts working with age 4 or 5 (that was usual in the peasant life that time). He is a sensible but an intelligent someone. He has the chance to go to high school, but his father decides against it, he needs the boy at the estate, Istvan should be a peasant like his father and not a useless dandy. After his marriage he (and his own family) wants to live his own life and not the life in the shadow of his father. He can see only one solution: to work in the USA, became rich and return to home. The story ends with the scene, he, his wife and the little Imre are just leaving the village.

The story bases on the life of Oravecz’s grand-grandfather. It’s a realistic novel, but a bit different as the way of realistic storytelling in the early 20. century for example. The way how the classic writers show the peasant-life is either to idealistic or too dark, tragic. I think, Oravecz find an healthy middle-course. Obviously, the distance of more than 100 years between the life of the characters and the life of the writer helps him a lot.