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Des dAuschwitz no ha ocorregut res que hagi abolit Auschwitz», va dir l'hongarès Imre Kertész en el discurs de recepció del Premi Nobel de Literatura 2002; «Per a Auschwitz no hi ha explicació», diu un dels personatges de Liquidació. Durant anys, Be, un escriptor i traductor d'origen jueu nascut al camp de concentració dAuschwitz, troba el seu únic motiu de supervivència en els límits que imposa un règim totalitari. El 1990, amb la caiguda daquella «presó acollidora», Be decideix suïcidar-se, deixant els seus originals a disposició del seu amic Keserü. Entre els papers, Keserü busca incansablement la gran novel·la que està convençut que Be va escriure, però només hi troba una obra de teatre sorprenent, Liquidació. Narració dins de la narració, Liquidació, l'última novel·la d'Imre Kertész, ha estat lloada per la crítica alemanya com una obra mestra.
Description
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 miraculously survived-take his life? As Kingsbitter searches for the answer -and for the novel he is convinced lies hidden among his friend's papers-"Liquidation" becomes an inquest into the deeply compromised inner life of a generation. The result is moving, revelatory and haunting.
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Media reviews
Berlingske Tidende
Kertész skriver glimtvis uovertruffent.
****
Fyens Stiftstidende
Et summarisk handlingsreferat kan på ingen måde beskrive den lille romans komplekse indhold. Kertesz bekræfter endnu en gang sin tro på litteraturen. 'På intet andet end litteraturen. Mennesket lever som en orm, men skriver som en gud'. Det er hans ikke synderligt opbyggelige budskab, der kun
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mildnes af Kertesz' suveræne omgang med sproget.
**** Show Less
Information
Siden jeg for to år siden læste Imre Kertész’ Kaddish for et ufødt barn, har denne bogs fortæller været min store etiske helt ... Det er meget sjældent, jeg læser bøger, hvor jeg er bange for at gå glip af et eneste ord. Men sådan har jeg det med Kertész’ bøger.
Weekendavisen
Fuldt vidende om at han hermed gentager sig selv, vil denne anmelder hævde, at Kertész har gjort det igen. Altså begået et mesterværk.
DR Kulturnyt
For mig skete der det der altid sker, når jeg læser en af Imre Kertesz romaner. Nogle laver små notater i bøgernes margen, når de falder over noget særlig vigtigt, som skal huskes, genfortælles. Det gør jeg ikke, jeg laver i stedet et æseløre. Ikke fordi det er kønnere – det er det
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ikke – men det er bare en vane jeg har. Og efter jeg har læst Likvidation – ja så har stort set hver anden eller tredje side af bogen fået et æseløre. Og det er jo ikke rasende hensigtsmæssigt eller nyttigt. Men i modsætning til så mange andre bøger, hvor automatpiloten klarer det meste af læsningen for mig – så byder Kertesz tynde romaner på indsigt og følelser og sprogligt mesterskab der slukker for automaten og sætter sig på tværs og stiller krav. Show Less
Jyllands-Posten
Jeg har endnu ikke læst Kaddish for et ufødt barn. Den roman, der i 2002 var den ydre anledning til, at ungarske Imre Kertész modtog Nobelprisen i litteratur. Det fortryder jeg nu, da jeg sidder med "Likvidation". For Imre Kertész er ikke kun en stil eller et sprog eller en genre. Han er noget
Det bliver til gengæld en dukkert, som man sent glemmer ... Imre Kertész er svær, men absolut uomgængelig, ser jeg nu, og det kan helt klart ikke gå hurtigt nok med at få læst mere af denne skarpe forfatter med sans for menneskehedens skingre tragedier.
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så foruroligende som et afgrundsdybt hav, som man puffes intetanende ud i, og som man først efter utallige svømmetag kan orientere sig i.Det bliver til gengæld en dukkert, som man sent glemmer ... Imre Kertész er svær, men absolut uomgængelig, ser jeg nu, og det kan helt klart ikke gå hurtigt nok med at få læst mere af denne skarpe forfatter med sans for menneskehedens skingre tragedier.
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User reviews
LibraryThing member bhowell
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
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)
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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)
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LibraryThing member John
This is a short but profound, sometimes disturbing but always thought-provoking meditation on what is reality, what is life and the purpose of it when Auschwitz exists, what is a society of individuals under a communist, totalitarian system, what is the meaning or usefulness of literature and
The story is fairly simple. B (or Bee, is the only designation given him) is a writer/translator who commits suicide and a friend, a literary editor completely disillusioned with the communist system becomes obsessed with finding B’s final novel which he has never seen or even heard of, but which he is convinced exists and which he hopes will explain the meaning of B’s death. The novel moves back and forth in time, back and forth in narrator (sometimes first person and third person almost in the same paragraph) and back and forth in structure as it starts out as a play, that reflects real life events, within a novel that explores the background to those events. I think the choice of “B” as opposed to any other letter in the alphabet is not fortuitous: as one protagonist notes, the question is not Hamlet’s: To be or not to be, but rather, Whether I am or I am not. And I think the movement back and forth in time and structure and person reflects Kertesz’s view that life is haphazard, that happenstance and circumstance largely dictate its structure: “Single locality, four characters…What brings them together? A shared past, and their links with B. The fortuitousness of both factors. The past is a random collectivity of fates tossed together onto a heap with a pitchfork.”
While he does not belabor them, because in a sense any comparative is monstrous, for Kertesz there are parallels between Auschwitz and the communist regime in Hungary. There are, in both instances, a senselessness, an aimlessness, a complete disconnect of cause and effect in an Alice-in-Wonderland state of “reality”. This description applies equally to the two worlds:
“We are living in an age of disaster; each of us is a carrier of the disaster, so there is a need for a particular art of living for us to survive. Disaster man has no fate, no qualities, no character. His horrific social milieu…tugs on him with the tractive force of a colossal whirlpool, until he gives up his resistance and chaos bursts in on him like a boiling-hot geyser, after which chaos becomes home to him. For him there can be no return to some center of the Self, a solid and irrefutable self-certainty; in other words, he is lost, in the most authentic sense of the word.”
Is there an objective reality in which one can perceive one’s place and role? That is something that Kertesz posits in almost the opening lines: “…reality had become a problematic concept for Kingbitter, but, more serious still, a problematic state.” Later, Kingbitter muses, “…only now do I see how difficult it must be for my clients, so-called (or perchance genuine) writers, to wrestle with unvarnished matter, objective reality, the entire phenomenological world , in order to reach the essence that glimmers behind it---that is, if any such thing exists, of course. In most cases, one sets off from the premise that it does exist, because one is unable to reconcile oneself to the inessentiality of one’s life…” Reality is, “totally incomprehensible and unknowable as it is, through being shielded from us by our imagination…”. But what is a reality, what is the past when both are constructed from the imaginations, even within the ambit of a single life, of hundreds if not thousands of people and interactions, all of which shape, determine and continually reconstruct the past and hence the present and even the future?
B’s life is doubly damned. The survivor’s guilt that he lives with is compounded hugely by the fact that he was born in Auschwitz….the spark of a new life brought forth in the cauldron of a circle of hell beyond even the imagination of Dante. Small wonder that for B, “…people have lost their flair for greatness [in all forms of art] and only their flair for murder has persisted, though undoubtedly they have refined the latter, their flair for murder, to an art, almost to the point of greatness…”. This is true and must stand as the greatest, most horrific legacy of the 20th century.
What is the role of writing in such a world? It provides the only framework within which one might try to make sense of life because it at least forces some thought and structure onto whatever is reality: “If you have a concept of the world, if you have not yet forgotten all that has happened, that you have a world at all, it is writing that has created it for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it; Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together.”
This has become a rather lengthy review of a relatively short book, but it is a book replete with challenging thoughts and concepts. Highly recommended.
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reading, how do humans interact with each other, what is the human spirit, how can one construct a world or a society when “…Good can be done in a life in which Evil is the life principle, but only at the cost of the doer’s sacrificing his life.” This is not an easy book; it demands close attention and thought; I was almost finished it but went back to the beginning because I had been interrupted in reading it over a couple of weeks and felt that I needed to absorb it in a continuous reading so as to appreciate what Kertesz is expounding and exploring. If one measure of good writing is a book that challenges you, demands your intellectual engagement, and leaves you thinking of it well afterwards, then this book succeeds.The story is fairly simple. B (or Bee, is the only designation given him) is a writer/translator who commits suicide and a friend, a literary editor completely disillusioned with the communist system becomes obsessed with finding B’s final novel which he has never seen or even heard of, but which he is convinced exists and which he hopes will explain the meaning of B’s death. The novel moves back and forth in time, back and forth in narrator (sometimes first person and third person almost in the same paragraph) and back and forth in structure as it starts out as a play, that reflects real life events, within a novel that explores the background to those events. I think the choice of “B” as opposed to any other letter in the alphabet is not fortuitous: as one protagonist notes, the question is not Hamlet’s: To be or not to be, but rather, Whether I am or I am not. And I think the movement back and forth in time and structure and person reflects Kertesz’s view that life is haphazard, that happenstance and circumstance largely dictate its structure: “Single locality, four characters…What brings them together? A shared past, and their links with B. The fortuitousness of both factors. The past is a random collectivity of fates tossed together onto a heap with a pitchfork.”
While he does not belabor them, because in a sense any comparative is monstrous, for Kertesz there are parallels between Auschwitz and the communist regime in Hungary. There are, in both instances, a senselessness, an aimlessness, a complete disconnect of cause and effect in an Alice-in-Wonderland state of “reality”. This description applies equally to the two worlds:
“We are living in an age of disaster; each of us is a carrier of the disaster, so there is a need for a particular art of living for us to survive. Disaster man has no fate, no qualities, no character. His horrific social milieu…tugs on him with the tractive force of a colossal whirlpool, until he gives up his resistance and chaos bursts in on him like a boiling-hot geyser, after which chaos becomes home to him. For him there can be no return to some center of the Self, a solid and irrefutable self-certainty; in other words, he is lost, in the most authentic sense of the word.”
Is there an objective reality in which one can perceive one’s place and role? That is something that Kertesz posits in almost the opening lines: “…reality had become a problematic concept for Kingbitter, but, more serious still, a problematic state.” Later, Kingbitter muses, “…only now do I see how difficult it must be for my clients, so-called (or perchance genuine) writers, to wrestle with unvarnished matter, objective reality, the entire phenomenological world , in order to reach the essence that glimmers behind it---that is, if any such thing exists, of course. In most cases, one sets off from the premise that it does exist, because one is unable to reconcile oneself to the inessentiality of one’s life…” Reality is, “totally incomprehensible and unknowable as it is, through being shielded from us by our imagination…”. But what is a reality, what is the past when both are constructed from the imaginations, even within the ambit of a single life, of hundreds if not thousands of people and interactions, all of which shape, determine and continually reconstruct the past and hence the present and even the future?
B’s life is doubly damned. The survivor’s guilt that he lives with is compounded hugely by the fact that he was born in Auschwitz….the spark of a new life brought forth in the cauldron of a circle of hell beyond even the imagination of Dante. Small wonder that for B, “…people have lost their flair for greatness [in all forms of art] and only their flair for murder has persisted, though undoubtedly they have refined the latter, their flair for murder, to an art, almost to the point of greatness…”. This is true and must stand as the greatest, most horrific legacy of the 20th century.
What is the role of writing in such a world? It provides the only framework within which one might try to make sense of life because it at least forces some thought and structure onto whatever is reality: “If you have a concept of the world, if you have not yet forgotten all that has happened, that you have a world at all, it is writing that has created it for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it; Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together.”
This has become a rather lengthy review of a relatively short book, but it is a book replete with challenging thoughts and concepts. Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member yooperprof
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
“. . . 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)
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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)
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LibraryThing member deebee1
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
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.
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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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member FPdC
The sense of loss that a group of friends feel for their dead companion is compound by their sense of loss in post-communist Hungary, and by the quest of one of them (Kingbitter, the main character of the book) for his deceased friend lost novel and for his own past. A story where the Holocaust,
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the years of Communist rule, and the contemporary lack of references is intermingled in the literary world of a group of friends. Maybe a reflection of the present day purposelessness some sense to exist in european societies. Show Less
LibraryThing member stillatim
This is great, as theory, and certainly stimulating: the horrors of Auschwitz are not simply held up as a banal ethical imperative, not mawkishly hawked, not made into an occasion for liberal self-congratulations. They are thought through responsibly. Imagine that.
Unfortunately, as novel, the pomo
Unfortunately, as novel, the pomo
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trickery seems a little too, well, tricksy. I could be wrong about this, and will re-read it at some point. Show Less
Call number
082
Original language
Catalan
Original publication date
2003 (original Hungarian)
2004 (English: Wilkinson)
ISBN
8429753850 / 9788429753851