My four stars aren't meant to detract from this novella's favorable reviews. Rather, I'd like to suggest that readers tackle this work after they read "Fateless." There's allusions to this more accessible novel in the novella; the latter seems to me more the interest of a philosophically inclined reader's group. While "Fateless" can be read on one's own and grasped, I believe that "Kaddish" would be better suited for collective study and discussion.

It offers few of the pleasures of fiction. Rather, with its considerations of Adorno, Hegel, and Bernhard, and with its nods to the prose of Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and perhaps Kafka, it's more a meditation/fulmination than a novel with an easy plot trajectory. It offers food for thought, but may be rather indigestible if gulped in one sitting. This is more the type of work that Nobel laureates get rewarded for late in their careers; the popular acclaim granted "Fearless" by contrast would first gain an audience for this author, in my estimation.

Again, this is not to detract from Kertesz' achievement, but simply to point out that (at least in English), this compressed, concentrated message may better be shared if taken in smaller, diluted portions among like-minded friends. (My impression is that in the original Hungarian, the agglutinative nature of that language would make this an even heavier, more weighty lump of prose.) It would serve as a fitting challenge after you've all read and discussed "Fateless." As I suggest, this novel can be contemplated with profit by one's self; this smaller work is best divided, nibbled, and ruminated over bite by bitter bite.

Definition: Kaddish -- A prayer recited in the daily synagogue services and by mourners after the death of a close relative.

In this novel, or more appropriately novella (it's less than 100 pages), the narrator, a failed writer and a holocaust survivor, writes what is ultimately a love letter to his unborn child, his child not born. He begins by reflecting on a night some time ago at a writer's retreat in Soviet-era Hungary when perhaps he first started pondering the context of his existence with one obsessive question in mind -- "my life in the context of the potentiality of your existence" with "your" referring to his unborn child. This is not a question the narrator necessarily wanted to address, but he had little choice as if being pulled by his unborn child, being "dragged. . . by this fragile little hand . . . down this path." What has led to this point in life where he will never see the "dark eyes" of his own little girl or the "gay and hard eyes like silver-blue gravel" of his own little boy.

This is not a nice, linear narrative. Instead we enter a dense story full of stream-of-consciousness with all of the narrator's philosophies, emotions, obsessions, fears and contradictions. We learn about his failed writing career, his school experiences, his relationship with his father and, most importantly, his relationship with his wife (now his ex-wife), the backbone of the narrative. Of interest to note, the author's concentration camp is never addressed in detail but is only referred to indirectly. The effect is intensifying as the holocaust becomes an evil lurking in the darkness, driving the narrator in ways only partially observable.

Ultimately, the narrator evolves his obsessive question from questioning his existence the context of his unborn child's potentiality to "your nonexistence in the context of the necessary and fundamental liquidation of my existence." And while his wife has her theories on what is going on with the narrator's retreat into darkness, the narrator can only leave us with the facts as they are and the conclusion there is an inscrutable survival instinct in us that drives us to survive even when we want to die. And the results of our survival instincts can make for a messy life, including the inward retreating, the severed relationships and, in this case, a divorce and a child not to be..

And then the heart-breaking realization may come to the reader of all that could be in our world. But in the end, sometimes we need to say Kaddish for both our children who die and our children never meant to be.

This book feels like a hundred-page sentence although there is punctuation and even a few paragraph breaks. It has to be read carefully as it is poetry and philosophy combined. While it has no plot in the normal sense, it beckons you into its world. It is a monologue delivered by a lonely, aging writer who is wrestling with the ghost of his failed marriage and with his secular Jewish identity years after the Holocaust. The monologue has a comic edge: the whining repetition about how a woman left long ago makes the reader feel slightly superior. But the narrator's repeated gripes are ultimately not intended to make him seem childish; they show us how we cling to the past and to other people when confronted with the terrifying, unfathomable realities of racism and loss.

No philosophical truths are uncovered. Rather, philosophical power is unleashed through the exploitation of contradiction, like the splitting of the atom. Do I exist? Does that mean anything? A negative answer inspires emotion. Emotion implies that we must exist and that this must have meaning. Death and life, hope and fear, sex and loneliness, race and assimilation are juxtaposed. The narrator reaches for the pairs with two arms outstretched. The philosophical effect of these contradictions lies in the poetry.

"No" is the first word of the book. Structurally, poetically, the book revolves around the spoken "no" more than it does around the narrator's decision not to have children. He lives in his "no." The "no" is his suicide. All other words are as a continuous breath that supports the "no" that frames the narrative. And, after this hundred-page sentence, we are left with the impression of a vast silence.

This year's Nobel prize winner Imre Kertesz's book about the Holocaust is one of the most powerful and touching books ever writen about this theme. Kertesz was a surprise Nobel-prize winner but after reading this book you'll probably see it was a well-earned prize for a very talented and gifted writer.

At the time the story is going on, it is 1944 and a Jewish boy is departed to a Nazi concentration camp along with his father. The book gives a different perspective of the horror, because it is written in an "I" form. As a reviewer mentioned before, this is not a "Life Is Beautiful" story. This is a "Life Is Horrible" story and it is a shocking experience you will never forget. Though the book is not about the writer himself, Kertesz experienced much of the story.

The book is never boring and makes you going on with the things to come - most of them unexpected and even more horrible than the ones before. Imre Kertesz survived this mayhem and he is the living proof of fate, even though this book's title is Fateless. It could only be fate that saved him and the survivors of the darkest times of the 20th century.

The only shame: he is not well known in his home country. Many Hungarian writers say: Hungary is a "language island" with a language barrier that can't be put down. I hope Kertesz's success shows every writer in the world that language can't be a barrier. Good stories make a writer. And if they're true - as this is case with Fateless - they can make very good writers. I recommend this book everyone with a heart and soul.

This book is astonishingly beautiful. I'll admit I never heard of this book or the author Kertesz until he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I will also admit I only picked it up because of the prize, and that the subject matter - concentration camps of World War II meant it sat around for several weeks while I debated whether there really was any reason to read one more account of the horrors of WWII - hasn't it all been said. But then I began to read and I was enchanted by the voice of the narrator - a young, bright non-religious Jew who precisely because he doesn't understand what is going on, presents us all with an authentic sense of his world. The chapter where he first arrives and ses all the convicts and wonders what they did to arrive there then follows him through the showers and shavings of his body and the clothing he is handed and his suddens realization that he too is now a convict is presented without editorilizing on identity, so that when he is transformed you feel it, not think it. There is no attempt to manipulate your feelings with pathos or self-pity, nor is there the bitterness of regret that comes from looking back. This book is written as it was experienced, so that there is no attempt to editoralize the situations or fit them into what shoudl be said. Thus we get both moments of horror and humor, of beauty even as the crematoriums smoke, of total selfishness and stubborn selflessness. Consider this passage when the very ill narrator is almost tossed in with the corpses and soon to be corpses arriving at Buchenwald, and is hoping for death's release: "Here and there suspicious smoke mixed with the more friendly vapors and from somewhere the sound of a familiar clanging reached out to me lke the ringing of bells in one's dreams... in spite of any other consideration, rational thought..I couldn't mistake the furtive words of some kind of quiet desire rising from within myself, as if embarrassed by their senselessness...I would so like to live a little longer in this beautiful concentration camp!" This is an extraordinaryly honest book of - not the concentration camps - but of a fellow human being - and that is why one should read it.

This book about the Holocaust is unique in so many ways. First of all, it is written from the personal perspective of a l5 year old and it is entirely in the first person. Second, the book focuses on the the meaning of these experiences to him in a most unusual way. Trying to cope with the day to day moments of life in a concentration camp, the boy sees his captors in human, sometimes sympathetic terms and views his surroundings in bright, respledant colors which would oridnarily not ever be associated with such an ordeal or experience. This small book is intelligent, beautifully written and surely worthy of the Nobel prize that it won. I could not put this book down once I started it, and came away thinking about this boy's ordeal in an entirely different way. The writing is powerful and pointed, almost even poetic at times. This book is definitely one of the top ten novels that I have ever read, and I have been reading for a long time.