Name: Liquidation
ISBN: 9781400075058

Imre Kertész

The suicide of a an acclaimed Hungarian writer who was born and survived the Auschwitz concentration camp forces his colleages and friends to confront their own identity, the Holocaust, and the rise and fall of Communist rule as they desperately try to understand their friend's death, in a novel by the 2002 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

Liquidation

Donald

"I mean... was it any good, or bad?"

"What does good and bad mean with a novel? Anyway, he himself never called it a novel."

"What did he call it then?"

"A manuscript, 'my piece'."

"What was it about? What was the story?"

I hesitated before plunging in all the same.

"The struggle of a man and woman. They love each other to start with, but later on the woman wants a child from the man, and he is unable to forgive the woman for that. He subjects the woman to various miseries in order to break and undermine her faith in the world. He drives her into a severe psychological crisis, to the verge of suicide, and when he realizes this, he himself commits suicide instead of the woman."

You were silent. Then you asked why the man was punishing the woman merely because she wanted a child.

"Because it is not permissible to want anything.'

"Why not?"

"Because of Auschwitz."

Trevor Berrett

With a title that connotes closing shops, selling assets, and cutting losses accompanied with abstract illustrations of people, none looking at each other, I was very interested. Add to that the fact that it is only a novella, something I could get through in one day, and it was a must-read. After reading it, I have to ask, why don't we, at least we in America, care much about those who win the Nobel Prize in Literature unless they're from here? This book was well worth the short time I put into reading it - in fact, it will be paying off for years to come. 

The book is set in Hungary in the 1990s. A decade or two earlier, “the hero of this story, Kingbitter” met B. or Bee, depending on the sentence. B.’s mother was four months pregnant when she was put into Auschwitz. Against the odds (“The blokova, possibly stirred by the thought of helping bring a child into the world in the death camp”), B. is born and survives, though he was immediately taken from his parents. Despite the miracle of B.’s birth, years later he commits suicide. That is where the book begins.

But for what reasons did B. commit suicide? That is where the book goes.

You can read my complete review on my blog, The Mookse and the Gripes.