BEASTS OF NO NATION
by Uzodinma Iweala
J Murray £12.99 pp180

Not many people would rush to read a novel based on the author’s boyhood experience of Nazi concentration camps. Even those who did might be shocked by the extra-ordinary self-pitiless objectivity of this one. Perhaps this explains why Fatelessness, originally published in Kertesz’s native Hungary 30 years ago, is only now being published here. The author, who won the Nobel prize in 2002, mainly for this novel and its two linked successors, was taken from Budapest to Auschwitz in 1944, when he was 14, and from there to Buchenwald and a smaller camp called Zeitz.

Nothing is lacking here of the horrors we all associate with the Holocaust: the cattle trucks, the gas chambers, the unremitting physical labour, the starvation rations, the brutality, the sickness and bodily decay. Yet when Kertesz’s hero Gyuri, after his release, is asked by a journalist to describe “the hell of the camps”, he replies that he can only imagine a concentration camp, not hell. When pressed, he answers that it would be “a place where it is impossible to become bored”. He is, of course, a boy with no experience of grown-up life, and besides, a very particular boy, pragmatic, truthful to what he sees, without preconceptions or, apparently, much fear or moral judgment. What inures him to the experience, as he explains towards the end of the novel, is that it happened “naturally”, “by steps”, and he instances the train, followed by the queue for the medical examination at Auschwitz, everyone taking steps for 10 to 20 minutes “before you reach the point where it is decided whether it will be gas immediately or a reprieve for the time being”.

Everything that happens to him and those around him is utterly strange and often unintelligible, but he observes and tries to make sense of it with the same punctilious care as Swift’s Gulliver among the Houyhnhnms. Entering Auschwitz, unaware of its purpose, except as a work camp in a foreign country, he accepts or endures everything in the same spirit: admiring the beauty of a sunrise or the orderliness of the camp’s layout, disgusted at first by the soup, the bread and the soap. Transferred to Buchenwald, he tells us that, unlike Auschwitz, there is only one crematorium, “for the only people who are burned up here are those who die in the camp, under the ordinary circumstances of camp life”, and remarks that somewhere in its grounds, “protected from us prisoners”, is a tree planted by Goethe.

“It is fair to say,” he adds, “that I too soon came to like Buchenwald,” and ends the book provocatively with, “Yes, the next time I am asked, I ought to speak about that, the happiness of the concentration camps.”

The perpetrators of all this, the Germans, are scarcely visible, for it is mostly other prisoners who rule Gyuri’s life in the camps, and it was his own countrymen, Hungarian policemen, who put him on the freight train for Auschwitz. Back in Budapest, questioned by the journalist about what he is feeling now he sees his city again, he replies with uncharacteristic emotion, “Hatred.”

Dreadful as its subject is, Fatelessness is a masterly, subtle and constantly surprising novel, which, in this fine translation, reads as if it were written in this century, not the last.

Beasts of No Nation, whose hero is also a boy, though an even younger one than Gyuri, is another grim story about the inhumanity of humans. Agu, son of a village schoolmaster, is a boy soldier in an African civil war, and tells his story in engaging pidgin English: “The enemy is saying to me, please don’t kill me oh. Please I beg enh.” This is the first novel by Uzodinma Iweala, a young Nigerian born in America, so it is probably not based on his own experience, though it reads almost as if it were. Snatched from a hut after his father has been shot and his mother and sister have fled, Agu trails along with a beleaguered group of guerrillas in a nameless country, destroying villages, raping and killing the inhabitants: “Person is running away from us like we are sickness.” The novel is short and taut, with no real surprises — except that Agu’s ordeal ends happily, even a little sentimentally.

Available at Books First prices of £13.49 (Kertesz) and £11.69 on 0870 165 8585

Times Recommends

• If you only buy one book this Christmas make sure it's...
• The Times Christmas Books 2008: Gifts
• 10 Books Not To Read Before You Die