Imre KerteszLiquidation: Imre Kertesz

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 in this novel 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.

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.

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.