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Set in Budapest a decade after the fall of Communism, this is a short, powerful novel about a renowned Hungarian writer whose suicide forces his close friends to confront some difficult truths about themselves and their individual struggles to live “normally” in post-Communist society. Among his papers, a play entitled Liquidation is discovered. In it, he eerily foretells the crises that his friends are now going through – having survived the Holocaust and Communist years and the surge of hope and optimism after Communism's downfall, they are left with a seeming emptiness, internal confusion, and loss of identity.

Kertsz writes sparsely, and there is neither wasted nor frivolous word in the narrative. It is almost as if there is an effort to save on words. But the writing is in no way simple. The story is intricately told from a friend's perspective alternately using the 3rd person and 1st person narrative, interspersed with script from the play, and finally, from the dead writer's ex-wife.

This novel effectively evokes the sense of frustration and helplessness among the so-called intellectuals in the 1990s. It was as if, “and now, what?”. There is a hesitation to face up to the underlying feeling of guilt, of loss of meaning, and the dead writer who was himself an Auschwitz survivor, had to be the one to push this question. ( )

Génial, dès les toutes premières lignes. Cocktail de styles – théâtre, narration, dialogues philosophiques –, de thèmes, de voix et de romans dans le roman. Réflexions sur l’écriture et la lecture, considérée comme activité à part entière. ( )

Het directe beschrijvende van Primo Levi met een tikje van het schilderachtige woordgebruik van Couperus. Geen makkelijke weglezer, maar wel een boek dat je als je er eenmaal goed inzit, moeilijk weg kunt leggen. Heel veel mooie beschrijvingen en mooie typeringen in een verhaalsetting die werkelijkheid en fictie nauw verweeft waardoor het voor de lezer verwarrend kan zijn. Maar het doel is niet zozeer een logisch verhaal te schrijven, maar om te laten proeven aan overleversschuld en aan de invloed die de holocaust ook jaren later nog kan hebben op iedereen met Joodse banden, tegen de achtergrond van een communistische staat die zich langzaam probeert aan te passen aan een democratiserend Europa.

Het speelt zich af in Boedapest. Hoofdpersoon B. is een schrijver die Auschwitz heeft overleefd en jaren later, aan het begin van het boek, zelfmoord pleegt. Zijn uitgever, Keserü, probeert de zelfmoord een plaats te geven, van logica te voorzien.

Ik weet niet waarom ik zoveel troost vond in die abstracte, onpersoonlijke gedachten, die ik niet eens helemaal kon volgen. Maar juist die algemeenheid vond ik prettig, het feit dat we niet in mijn geval gingen wroeten en niet mijn zielenroerselen gingen ontleden: dat hielp me juist om afstand te nemen van mijn mateloos saaie praktische zorgen, waarvoor toch geen oplossing was en die hoe dan ook altijd wel opgelost worden, zoals ook in dit geval. Maar mijn geval deed zich ineens aan me voor als een theoretisch probleem, en dat was deels vruchtbaar en bevrijdde me deels ook van mezelf, wat ik juist nodig had. ( )

Hungarian author Imre Kertész, born in 1929, is an Auschwitz survivor and winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for literature. “Liquidation” (2003) is the first work of his that I’ve read. It concerns the suicide of B., a writer who was born at Auschwitz, and his friend’s subsequent search for a manuscript that he hopes will unlock the mystery of his life and death. It’s a puzzle piece, a seriest of intricately linked riddles, an ironic tease, but I think this passage gets close to the nub:

“. . . I believe in writing – nothing else; just writing. Man may live like a worm, but he writes like a god. There was a time when that secret was known, but now it has been forgotten; the world is composed of disintegrating fragments, an incoherent dark chaos, sustained by writing alone. If you have a concept of the world, if you have not forgotten all that has happened, that you have a world at all, it is writing that has created that for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it; Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together.”

(translation by Tim Wilkinson) ( )

It took me a while to get into the rhythm of the language but once I did, off I went into a dark world of disillusionment and metaphysical musing. I found the structure of the book weak and Kertesz’s voice wavering; tedious might be a better description. Here are the opening lines:

“Let us call our man, the hero of this story, Kingbitter. We imagine a man, and a name to go with him. Or conversely, let us imagine the name, and the man to go with it. Though this may all be avoided anyway since our man, the hero of this story really is called Kingbitter.”

He then goes on to tell how Kingbitter’s father was called by that name, as well as his grandfather, and that same name is registered on his birth certificate. So the entire first page could have simply said: The hero of this story is a man called Kinbitterr. But I guess from the start Kertesz was laying the foundation of Kingbitter’s problem with the concept or state of reality.

Kingbitter is and editor. A close friend of his, a writer and Auschwitz survivor, commits suicide. Among the papers his friend leaves behind is a play called Liquidation that eerily predicts the behaviour of his ex-wife, his mistress, and Kingbitter himself.

I would have preferred Kertesz to stick with the initial structure of the book, that is, a play within a novel, but he went off in other directions that made the book difficult to cozy up to. But I guess that was his point. His story is not one that is comfortable, it’s not a cute bunny book, but a bleak and twisted tale of a society recently released from the grips of communism and searching for its identity.

My favorite passage:

“Masses of books, good and bad, of all sorts of genres are dormant within me. Sentences, words, paragraphs, and lines of poetry that, like restless subtenants, unexpectedly spring to life and wander solitarily about or at other times launch into a loud chattering that I am unable to quell. An occupational hazard.”

Irme Kertesz was imprisoned in Auschwitz and later in Buchenwald. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002.

I believe Fatelessness may have been his better work, but since I’ve yet to read it, I’m guessing. Can anyone confirm this? ( )

B. est né à Auschwitz et n'arrive pas à se réconcilier à la vie, tel est le roman presque surréaliste où les personnages essaient de donner sens à leur vie dans un environnement des plus cynique. Rapide à lire mais dense de réflexion, ce livre n'est pas facile à digérer. Il pose la question : qu'est-ce qui gagne sur Terre, la vie ou la mort? ( )

This is a very good book by an Hungarian author who won the Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature in 2002 but it is not for everyone.Though a short book, its a bit heavy and dark for a lot of readers. It is however a fascinating look into the lives of a circle of intellectuals who have survived the Holacaust, survived Communism, and 10 years later struggle to find meaning in their lives. Where do you go when you have spent a lifetime taking risks, engaging in secret meetings and sometimes going to jail for freedom of the press and for the liberation of writers imprisoned because of their books? The answer should surely be that you rejoice and participate in the flowering of new literature. Sadly these characters are too foccussed upon themselves and their previous importance to move on. They tear themselves apart with disastrous results.
It is also interesting to note that this book was published in the US and Can by Knopf in 2004 and this would seem to be the first edition in English. Vintage USA now has a pb available, but it was not published in the UK until 2006 by Harvill Secker and it was highlighted as new HC fiction there as late as the summer in 2007.(I was there and I saw it) ( )