LIQUIDATION
BY IMRE KERTESZ
KNOPF, 144 PAGES, $22
IF I THINK of a new book, I always think of Auschwitz," Imre Kertesz remarked in one interview of hundreds following his winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002. In that year, press and the reading public from Sweden to America and beyond were introduced to one of the most intelligent, ironic and demanding writers of a European half-century not exactly devoid of its more iconoclastic artists. Until then almost totally unknown outside of his native Hungary and a select European readership—and in the academic spheres of America that deal with that most difficult of disciplines, Hungarian translation—Kertesz's works had a few messages in a bottle for the greater world: Auschwitz, which the author survived, was not an anomaly; Auschwitz was the failure of the West; and some days in Auschwitz were among the happiest of Kertesz's life.
These ideas come across to us most stridently, and with intimations of pure genius, in Kertesz's earlier two novels translated into English, Fateless and Kaddish for a Child Not Born. The first is a coming-of-age tale that just happens to be set in the utopia of history's worst death-camp. Taking his tone from Tadeusz Borowski's brilliantly apocalyptic This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Kertesz treats on a childhood that involves no loss of innocence; rather, the innocence of Kertesz's Auschwitz-childhood is an innocence perpetually contextualized, and deepened, by the joys of bread crusts and benevolent hospital wards in a narrative that elevates the simplest of bodily pleasures into an invincible spiritual antidote to the gravest of evil.
In English, Kertesz's Kaddish followed: one long monologue, or rather kaddish, for the child its narrator (who resembles Kertesz in the extreme) never engendered. How to have a child after Auschwitz is the question attempted through a narrative that—like the work of many recent European writers, including this year's Nobel Laureate, Austrian Elfriede Jelinek—usurps the style and psychology of the novels of Thomas Bernhard. Bernhard's work—which owes much to the language-philosophy of Wittgenstein, in addition to the shorter prose of Dostoyevsky—is above all an endless encyclopedia of perpetually repeated, compared and contradicted, discarded and retrieved questions about the utility of humanity in a morally post-human universe.
And now we have Liquidation to ponder, Kertesz's most textured and indirect address to the future of European sensibility through an examination of its private past. Liquidation opens after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and gives us Kingbitter, a well-meaning editor at a Hungarian publishing house now failing with the pressures of privatization. Kingbitter's mirror-image—almost the other, more eastern, half of Europe—is Kertesz's double as well, a Holocaust survivor and writer named B. who killed himself 10 years prior, in 1990, with an overdose of heroin. Kingbitter has in his hands a play—titled the same as the book in one of the most deft, and psychologically adept, attempts at metafiction in print—a play that seems to recreate, or reproduce, the dialogue among B.'s friends that followed his suicide.
Kingbitter (his name in the novel is his name in the play), a tragic-comic heir to Thomas Mann's Zeitblom and every friend-of-an-intellectual of European literature, is searching, and with increasing desperation, for a grand novel that he is convinced exists somewhere, in some state of completion, among B.'s papers. As reality and absurdity intermix in these pages to a degree almost legislated in this part of Europe, it is revealed that B. was having an affair with Kingbitter's Sarah, while of course Kingbitter himself was sleeping with B.'s wife Judit. And all of these lies, rationalizations, intimations of failure and greatness, hesitations, retractions and prophecies both of the play and of the novel, and of the novel Liquidation as the legacy-in-itself are narrated—among the author's signature nods to Bernhard, Paul Celan and E.M. Cioran—against the ever-present taint of history, of Sovietism and the Holocaust and their lingering manifestations in a present-day whose more "progressive" qualities are almost negated by Kertesz, by his wounds and his pride.
Indeed, Kertesz's novelistic achievement is the artistic apex of a time that is over, or that will be over soon. The last survivors of the Holocaust will be dead within the lifespan of the first generation born in Eastern Europe after the death of communism. And so any testimony will come to their children, and their children's world, secondhand, and maybe not even through novels and plays but through movies and the internet and technologies that have not yet been invented to transmit collective memory. Kertesz, and his works, stand on the precipice of his generation—one of the darkest in world history—and scream into the void of a future that they cannot know. It is for the younger generation to perpetuate works such as Kertesz's. They not only provide an accurate image of the mind of a survivor, but, because they are art, they communicate the humanity of history in a way that no future will ever improve upon. o
