Liquidation

by Imre Kertész

Book Overview

Imre Kert sz's savagely lyrical and suspenseful new novel traces the continuing echoes the Holocaust and communism in the consciousness of contemporary Eastern Europe.

Ten years after the fall of communism, a writer named B. commits suicide, devastating his circle and deeply puzzling his friend Kingsbitter. For among B.'s effects, Kingsbitter finds a play that eerily predicts events after his death. Why did B.--who was born at Auschwitz and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 140007505X
• ISBN13: 9781400075058
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

There Have Been Two Sorts of Novels in Our Lifetime...

... One is about the Holocaust and the other isn't. At least, that's how my reading has gone recently, with brilliant painful books by Herta Müller and Imre Kertesz at the top of the list. Both writers have won Nobels, deservedly. Kertesz's "Fateless" and Müller's "Herztier" (Land of Green Plums) surely rank with the finest modern novels in any language. Both are challenging creations artistically, emotionally, and intellectually. "Liquidation" is a short tale, narrated by an 'editor' who is obsessed with recovering the lost novel of his friend "B", an Auschwitz survivor as a baby who commits suicide soon after the fall of Communism in Hungary. There are subtle threads between the 'fictional' personae of "Liquidation" and Kertesz's other works, particularly "Kaddish for an Unborn Child." In fact, the "B" of Liquidation is effectively the narrator of Kaddish, so in a sense the lost novel was found in Kertesz's own hands. In my previous review of Kaddish, I noted a similarity of style between Kertesz and the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, who should have won a Nobel also but didn't. Sure enough, Bernhard is acknowledged in Liquidation, on page 56. Then, on page 72, we discover that "B" had intentions of preparing a new translation into Hungarian of "The Radetzky March", the great novel by the Austrian Joseph Roth, which I've also reviewed. At this point, my reading of recent years seems to demonstrate quantum entanglement. I don't want to reveal any more of the plot or structure of Liquidation; it's a book that reveals itself by stripping away its own complexities and ambiguities as you read it. Here are some snippets from it, which set my mind awhirl: From B's suicide note: "Don't feel sorry for me. I had a perfect life. Of its kind. All one has to do is recognize, and that recognition was my life." Shades of Spinoza! Who would not have survived the Holocaust, had he lived in our times. "This being without Self is the disaster, the true Evil, said "B", though, comically enough, without your being evil yourself, albeit capable of any evil act. ... beware of knowing thyself, else thou shalt be damned, he said." From B's account of interrogation by the Communist police: "I was forced to an acknowledgement of the stark fact that man is, both physically and morally, an utterly vulnerable being -- not an easy thing to accept in a society whose ideals and practice are determined by a police view of the world from which there is no escape and where no explanation of any kind is satisfactory, not even if those alternatives are set before me by external duress rather than by myself, so that I actually have nothing to do with what I do or what is done to me." The 'alternatives' mentioned here are either to agree to become an informer or to be tortured. "Interrogation" is a nearly ubiquitous element in writings about the tyrannies of the last century, both communist and fascist. The interrogation scenes in Kertesz's and Müller's novels, set in Hunga

A Valuable Addition to Holocaust Literature

This is the third book by Kertesz that I have read. "Fateless" was the best but "Kaddish to a Child not Born" was pretty good after I got used to the non-stop monologue format. "Liquidation" has a lot to offer as well but, frankly, I found the format a bit incoherant. The novella is about an Aushwitz survivor who took his life. We see most things through the eyes of our narrator, another concentration-camp survivor. The deceased was a writer and the narrator is a literary person as well. The narrator becomes obsessed with the notion that an author would not take his life without completing his opus first. Thus he examines the available writings he can find and pursues his search for the elusive novel. It is in this context that the truth reveals itself. Truth is hard to find if life seems to be a lie. That is, essentially, the focus of the message in "Liquidation". Since the message builds on itself much better than I can do it justice, I will not attempt to further define what our narrator discovers. However, I will say that my observation of Holocaust literature is that those that try to define what happened and give it meaning generally reach the same end. The Holocaust defies definition because we look to define in relation to our concepts of reality. What the literary Holocaust survivor shares with us, often, is a glimpse of a totally different reality but their ability to explain generally exceeds our ability to comprehend. In "Liquidation" Kertesz expands his message by giving us a debate about that reality through the perspectives of seperate Holocaust survivors. The debate enhances our efforts to understand but leaves us wondering if we have heard the conclusion or the introduction.

Bitter prose....

Kertesz writes same old book over and over again, from Fateless to Liquidation. And yet, we cannot get enough of it. Questions posed in those books poke at the mind with such fiercness that sheer struggle remains to hold on to ones sanity. It is the question of existance, of possibility of existance. And of the world that made that question possible. How can one live a life where even his birth was an anomaly, something that never should have happened, luck, coincidence, life in the camp of death where Arbeit mach frei...Can he exist as a writer, and is his personal legacy in a from of literature strong enough to revoke effects of concentrational camps. Kertesz say "no", and leaves an emptiness for every reader to fill out himself. Love and sex, marriage and relationships hold no meaning in Kertesz's world of pain, world of morbid and twisted humanity which is, sadly, world that we live in. What is a Jew, and what is the meaning of being Jew? Questions posed in a postmodern (yeay! everything is postmodern nowadays) way of author who had written a play that speaks of character of an author reading it...Yet, that is just a style practice...Final part of Kertesz's tetralogy doesen't close this chapter at all, it just prolongs a moment of necessary answer...A must read!

El delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido

In this novel, the central character answers the same crucial question posed in 'Kaddish for a child not born': why staying alive after Auschwitz?' In 'Kaddish' the author decided to live in order to write: 'My pencil is my shovel'. The real rebellion for him was to stay alive. The central character here commits suicide and orders that his literary creations be burned. The liquidation is complete. 'Why he did it?' is the question that the narrator of this book tries to find out. The novel is an accumulation of liquidations. The narrator's family was a product of wars and dictatorships. After fascism and Auschwitz, as a lector in a publishing house he gets in trouble with the collectivist bureaucracy, where 'state subsidies are a disguised form of liquidation of literature'. Finally, his publishing house goes bankrupt. The overall sentiment in 'Liquidation' is one of bitterness and nausea provoked by the poison of universal impotence. Although the combination theatre/novel is highly original, I found that this book was more loosely built than 'Kaddish'. But it is still a very worth-while read.

Is one allowed to live after Auschwitz?

The Hungarian writer B. commits suicide after the fall of communism. His editor, Keserü, tries to find out why he killed himself, for which he needs to trace the whereabouts of a manuscript by B. Meanwhile it becomes more and more clear that B. is a victim of Auschwitz: he was born in Auschwitz and the rest of his life is devoted to the question whether a man is alllowed to live after surviving Auschwitz. And in the background there is the play in which B. has described very precisely how the people near him will react after his death. The title of the book "Liquidation" is very appropriately chosen: Auschwitz killed millions of Jews, B. makes the life of his wife Judith impossible, communism gets wiped out, the publishing house for which B. and Keserü work goes broke, B. commits suicide, after ending his life he causes a big crisis in Judith' second marriage and the manuscript of his novel is liquidated. A beautifully written book that leaves both the reader and Keserü empty-handed and with a lot of questions.