Liquidation

Rating:
Summary: El delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido
Review: In this novel, the central character answers the same crucial question posed in 'Kaddish for a child not born': why staying alive after Auschwitz?'
In 'Kaddish' the author decided to live in order to write: 'My pencil is my shovel'. The real rebellion for him was to stay alive.
The central character here commits suicide and orders that his literary creations be burned. The liquidation is complete.
'Why he did it?' is the question that the narrator of this book tries to find out.

The novel is an accumulation of liquidations. The narrator's family was a product of wars and dictatorships. After fascism and Auschwitz, as a lector in a publishing house he gets in trouble with the collectivist bureaucracy, where 'state subsidies are a disguised form of liquidation of literature'. Finally, his publishing house goes bankrupt.

The overall sentiment in 'Liquidation' is one of bitterness and nausea provoked by the poison of universal impotence.

Although the combination theatre/novel is highly original, I found that this book was more loosely built than 'Kaddish'.
But it is still a very worth-while read.

Rating:
Summary: Is one allowed to live after Auschwitz?
Review: The Hungarian writer B. commits suicide after the fall of communism. His editor, Keserü, tries to find out why he killed himself, for which he needs to trace the whereabouts of a manuscript by B. Meanwhile it becomes more and more clear that B. is a victim of Auschwitz: he was born in Auschwitz and the rest of his life is devoted to the question whether a man is alllowed to live after surviving Auschwitz. And in the background there is the play in which B. has described very precisely how the people near him will react after his death.

The title of the book "Liquidation" is very appropriately chosen: Auschwitz killed millions of Jews, B. makes the life of his wife Judith impossible, communism gets wiped out, the publishing house for which B. and Keserü work goes broke, B. commits suicide, after ending his life he causes a big crisis in Judith' second marriage and the manuscript of his novel is liquidated. A beautifully written book that leaves both the reader and Keserü empty-handed and with a lot of questions.