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Zusatztext “Writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” –From the Nobel Prize citation “Not since Kafka or Beckett–both clear influences–has a writer packed so much metaphysics into so tight a space.... [A] classic literary detective story.” – The New York Times Book Review “A judgmentÉon the human spiritÉ. By turns sardonic! watchful andÉbitterly despairing.” – Los Angeles Times Book Review Informationen zum Autor Imre Kertesz translated by Tim Wilkinson Klappentext Imre Kertész'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. Let us call our man, the hero of this story, Kingbitter. We imagine a man, and a name to go with him. Or conversely, let us imagine the name, and the man to go with it. Though this may all be avoided anyway since our man, the hero of this story, really is called Kingbitter. Even his father was already called that. His grandfather too. Kingbitter was accordingly registered on his birth certificate under the name Kingbitter: that, therefore, is the reality, on which—reality, that is to say—Kingbitter did not set too much store nowadays. Nowadays—a late year of the passing millennium, in the early spring of, let us say, 1999, on a sunny morning at that—reality had become a problematic concept for Kingbitter, but, more serious still, a problematic state. A state from which, on the report of Kingbitter’s most private feelings, it was reality above all that was lacking. If he were in some way compelled to make use of the word, Kingbitter invariably added “so-called reality.” That, however, was a very meager satisfaction; nor indeed did it satisfy Kingbitter. Kingbitter, as he did frequently nowadays, was standing at his window and looking out onto the street below. This street offered the most mundane and ordinary sights of Budapest’s mundane and ordinary streets. The muck-, oil-, and dog-dirt-spattered sidewalk was lined with parked cars, and in the one-yard gaps between the cars and the leprotically peeling house walls the most mundane and ordinary passersby were attempting to go about their business, their hostile features an outward clue to their dark thoughts. Every now and then, perhaps in a hurry to overtake the single file inching along in front, one of them would step off the sidewalk, only for an entire chorus of rancorous car horns to give the lie to any groundless hope of breaking free from the line. On the benches in the square over the way, at least the benches not already stripped of their planks, were perched the homeless of the area, with their bundles, shopping bags, and plastic flasks. Above a bushy beard sprouted a knitted cap of carmine red, its dangling bobble merrily brushing the forbidding fuzz. A man wearing the battered cap of an officer of some nonexistent army was in a faded, buttonless heavy overcoat bound by a coy silk belt of gaudy floral design that had no doubt once belonged to a woman’s housecoat. On bunioned female feet, peeking from beneath a pair of jeans, silvered evening shoes with worn-down heels; farther off, on a narrow strip of sparse turf, legs drawn up in catatonic inertness, sprawled a figure indistinguishable fro...
