LIQUIDATION
by Imre Kertesz
Harvill Secker ₤12.99, 144 pages

Literary editor Kingbitter is an ageing, solitary observer of life in Budapest. He has two remaining passions, each bitten by sorrow. The first is to watch the drunk and homeless in the park opposite his window, the second is to read and reread a play manuscript, “Liquidation”, written by his late friend, B.

The play uses Kingbitter and his acquaintances as characters, and foretells the “radical boredom” that sets into their lives after the scandal and anger of communist rule has subsided. This doubling - a play within a novel, and real life within a play - keeps the novel progressing in a surreal state.

In his Nobel acceptance speech in 2002, Imre Kertesz described how the experience of Auschwitz had “suspended literature”. This feeling, and the memory of the death camps, informs all of his writing. Born in Budapest to a Jewish family, Kertesz was deported as a teenager in 1944 to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald, escaping death by pretending to be a worker, not a student.

For Kertesz, the Holocaust is indescribable, which means that it is never-ending: “nothing has happened since Auschwitz that could reverse or refute Auschwitz. In my writings the Holocaust could never be present in the past tense,” he said.

Liquidation continues this preoccupation. It has shunned conventional narrative structure - instead of plot, suspense and revelation, the book proceeds circuitously around its story. We learn obliquely that B’s life, which ended in morphine-induced suicide, had begun in Auschwitz - he was born in the camp’s hospital, where his mother had managed to conceal her pregnancy from the guards.

Kingbitter’s obsessive rereadings of B’s play leads him to believe that there is another mystery to be solved. When he discovered B’s body, he scrambled together B’s papers before they could be confiscated. Among them he found the play, but he becomes convinced that B’s magnum opus, a novel, is yet to be discovered. Does the book, the “missing piece” of B’s career, really exist? Again, it is the Holocaust that dictates the answer: the fictional mystery is a mystery about literature itself - what, if anything, can be written after the black hole created by the death camps?

Redemption is scarce in Liquidation. Human relationships offer more pain than joy, and even love offers little hope. Kingbitter, whose name seems to represent grief rather than resentment, lives alone - his wife left him after he dared to criticise a piece of political writing. This stand put his moral convictions above the security of his family, and again the characters of Liquidation are robbed of quiet individual living. Normal, domestic happiness is portrayed as unsustainable.

Liquidation is a short novel that bears a sadness disproportionate to its length. Despite the unshakeable influence of Auschwitz, it has all the fragmentation familiar to earlier postmodern literature, and those who read for the pleasures of rich prose will be disappointed. It is an undeniably tragic work, and for all its mechanical literary diversions it has a pathos and resonance that transcend the morbid legacy from which it springs.