BOOK - "Liquidation"

Imre Kertesz’s novel, Liquidation, reads like one of Paul Auster’s meta-fictional detective stories. However, Kertesz isn’t interested in exploring the elements of chance that influence our life: tragedy and suffering have already written our destinies, and luck has nothing to do with it. It does require a certain wit though, and so the author allows a Nabokovian narrative to lead the first third of the text: Kingbitter is obsessed with a play called “Liquidation.” The script, often cited in the book, also has a character named Kingbitter, and this character also analyzes a play called “Liquidation.” This contextual epaulette doesn’t come across as a trapping: it flows giddily across the page, giving breath to the parallel stories: Kingbitter is trying to cope with B.’s death, and B. is struggling to come to terms with the legacy of his birth (a life founded on death).

Kingbitter happens to be a literary editor, and as such constantly flagellates the shallowness of his prose. This device allows Kertesz to find pockets of brevity in the serious material and shows the paradox of human suffering: we must know happiness to know sorrow. Another tactic used is the repetition of adjectives—not for lack of a thesaurus, but to stress the parallels: “A new day had just begun, just as superfluously as I myself was standing there superfluously in my nightdress.” The other is an unflagging use of irony: “The reason we are able to live here, the reason we have any dwelling at all, is because, luckily, the original owners were exterminated.” Perhaps this short novel does have to do with luck after all.

Writing a novel like this—an ouroboros of solipsism—can easily slip into rants, but Kertesz keeps the narrative steady and forceful, as if speaking from real need (which, so to speak, he is). Furthermore, his frequent conclusions (despite all that’s unsaid) at least give the illusion of progress (though it is clear no such ‘ending’ can ever be realized in life). “Only from our stories can we discover that our stories have come to an end, otherwise we would go on living as if there were still something for us to continue (our stories, for example); that is, we would go on living in error.”

My one regret is that the translation (or perhaps Kertesz himself) grows convoluted, sprouting incongruous sentences that break up the natural rhythms of the casual dialogue. For instance: “...in B.’s untidy yet for Kingbitter readily legible handwriting.” That’s just not a friendly phrase. Nor are the dense references to other fictions: “...like Lohengrin lying unawakened in Elsa.” I can see the point for it, and it doesn’t take too long to Google, but it makes Liquidation almost a bit too heady for its down-to-earth conclusion. A shame too, since Kertesz so simply puts Bee’s plight into words: a revolutionary must always be fighting for something, and so it figures that such a figure may eventually grow tired of “seeking new prisons.” So true: we live to find ways to keep ourselves occupied, tying ourselves to our work as if we might otherwise float away (which we, perhaps, might). This is certainly what happens to Kingbitter, who spends his days re-reading “Liquidation” (the past) and spending his present trying to find a mysterious novel that he is sure his dear friend must have left behind (the future). Kingbitter’s story is probably the most human, trapped as he is between two ever-changing moments, and his “unspeakable” affairs aren’t horrible, just horribly human.

That—life’s unfortunate truth—is something Kertesz never shies from, and his inescapable language draws the reader in: “Her face puffy, steeped to a red-raw sponge.” The one escape he offers is that of any novel: escapism. After all, “Man may live like a worm, but he writes like a God.” Auschwitz transmutes into a miracle (of birth), and then back into the tragedy of the son who cannot escape that original sin. “He did not understand my huge, unpardonable blunder of acting as if the world was not a world of murders, and of wishing to settle myself snugly down in it.” I think Bee understands too well; it is the ability to accept it that he lacks. That, perhaps, is tragedy enough.