When he won the Nobel Prize in 2002, the committee noted that his writing “upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history". This is very much a theme in Fatelessness. Ostensibly the tale of a young Hungarian boy swept away from his life in Budapest through the changing fortunes of the Second World War.

Ethnically, the boy is a Jew; yet his family (bar an uncle) do not actually practise that religion. In this way, the notion of being persecuted – to the extent of Auschwitz – for something you are unsure of yourself underwrites an incredibly detached narrative tone that is at once disturbing as it is revealing. He writes in a bleakly matter-of-fact tone, and the vehicle of naïve teen convincingly establishes no sense of collective identity here.

In this way, the novel really does transcend the specific tragedy of the Hungarian Jews. Kertész recalls the iniquity of imposed difference through the eyes of a teenager caught up in a process he does not understand (if it could ever be understood). The boy drifts through the camps with simple curiosity: no matter what terrible things that he sees, everything seems reasonable because it is all he knows. In this way, the expected physical and mental degradation is established with cool detachment and the child simply accommodates to the new normality.

It recalls Kafka in the way the novel documents the madness of a system that draws people in, with no expectation of ‘explanation’ or ‘understanding’. This isn’t a book that Hollywood will snatch up and recreate, there’s no ‘moral’ (that’s the moral). What makes the story so genuinely poignant, as well as so utterly, radically unsentimental, is the contrast between the boy’s unqualified idealism – to the point of bemused detachment – and the reader's logical expectation of the opposite.

This is a book to read. I couldn’t recommend it more highly. Beware though, it will stay with you.