Liquidation (edition 2004)

Buitengewoon knap geconstrueerde roman waarin de vernietigende kracht van Auschwitz, lang na het sluiten van het kamp, nog steeds actief bezig is. ( )

Gruppo di Lettura "Libri che parlano di libri" dal 11 luglio: http://www.anobii.com/forum_thread?topicId=3171580#new_thread Calendario: I parte: Dall'inizio a "Allora, quando cominciammo a fare amicizia (...) come se vi riconoscessi un mio sogno lontanissimo e assurdo) (dall'inizio pag. 17 del pdf) II parte: Da "E ora si pone una questione: come si può essere persiani?" (pag 17 del pdf) a "E comunque, da allora nostro figlio è cresciuto (...) altro che redattori!" (pag 22 del pdf) III parte: Da "Certo è che non era accaduto di proposito" (pag 22 del pdf) alla fine. FINITO L'impressione finale è di confusione, insoddisfazione, non sono sicura di cosa ho letto realmente... credo che la "digestione" avverrà in varie fasi... frammento dopo frammento... So di aver letto un racconto sulla vita di un editore, una bozza di una sceneggiatura teatrale ambientata nella Budapest post-comunista, degli appunti di vita/ricordi di un nato-sopravvissuto ad Auschwitz, le impressioni di una donna che ha convissuto con un uomo "morto alla nascita", vittima del suo passato... Mi sono tornati in mente vari libri, film, opere teatrali, totalmente diversi per genere ed argomento: "Waiting for Godot", "A Est di Bucarest", i racconti di Levi, "I figli della paura" di Simmons, saggi storici e testimonianze di sopravvissuti... ognuno è stato richiamato alla memoria da una frase, da un'immagine, probabilmente rileggendo il libro ne troverei altre totalmente diverse. La sensazione di insoddisfazione (non c'è una trama, non c'è un inizio né soprattutto una fine) mi lascia perplessa, non so se vorrei avere una prosecuzione del libro o almeno sapere dove andare a cercare le domande che sono sorte... ( )

The sense of loss that a group of friends feel for their dead companion is compound by their sense of loss in post-communist Hungary, and by the quest of one of them (Kingbitter, the main character of the book) for his deceased friend lost novel and for his own past. A story where the Holocaust, the years of Communist rule, and the contemporary lack of references is intermingled in the literary world of a group of friends. Maybe a reflection of the present day purposelessness some sense to exist in european societies. ( )

This is a short but profound, sometimes disturbing but always thought-provoking meditation on what is reality, what is life and the purpose of it when Auschwitz exists, what is a society of individuals under a communist, totalitarian system, what is the meaning or usefulness of literature and reading, how do humans interact with each other, what is the human spirit, how can one construct a world or a society when “…Good can be done in a life in which Evil is the life principle, but only at the cost of the doer’s sacrificing his life.” This is not an easy book; it demands close attention and thought; I was almost finished it but went back to the beginning because I had been interrupted in reading it over a couple of weeks and felt that I needed to absorb it in a continuous reading so as to appreciate what Kertesz is expounding and exploring. If one measure of good writing is a book that challenges you, demands your intellectual engagement, and leaves you thinking of it well afterwards, then this book succeeds.

The story is fairly simple. B (or Bee, is the only designation given him) is a writer/translator who commits suicide and a friend, a literary editor completely disillusioned with the communist system becomes obsessed with finding B’s final novel which he has never seen or even heard of, but which he is convinced exists and which he hopes will explain the meaning of B’s death. The novel moves back and forth in time, back and forth in narrator (sometimes first person and third person almost in the same paragraph) and back and forth in structure as it starts out as a play, that reflects real life events, within a novel that explores the background to those events. I think the choice of “B” as opposed to any other letter in the alphabet is not fortuitous: as one protagonist notes, the question is not Hamlet’s: To be or not to be, but rather, Whether I am or I am not. And I think the movement back and forth in time and structure and person reflects Kertesz’s view that life is haphazard, that happenstance and circumstance largely dictate its structure: “Single locality, four characters…What brings them together? A shared past, and their links with B. The fortuitousness of both factors. The past is a random collectivity of fates tossed together onto a heap with a pitchfork.”

While he does not belabor them, because in a sense any comparative is monstrous, for Kertesz there are parallels between Auschwitz and the communist regime in Hungary. There are, in both instances, a senselessness, an aimlessness, a complete disconnect of cause and effect in an Alice-in-Wonderland state of “reality”. This description applies equally to the two worlds:

“We are living in an age of disaster; each of us is a carrier of the disaster, so there is a need for a particular art of living for us to survive. Disaster man has no fate, no qualities, no character. His horrific social milieu…tugs on him with the tractive force of a colossal whirlpool, until he gives up his resistance and chaos bursts in on him like a boiling-hot geyser, after which chaos becomes home to him. For him there can be no return to some center of the Self, a solid and irrefutable self-certainty; in other words, he is lost, in the most authentic sense of the word.”

Is there an objective reality in which one can perceive one’s place and role? That is something that Kertesz posits in almost the opening lines: “…reality had become a problematic concept for Kingbitter, but, more serious still, a problematic state.” Later, Kingbitter muses, “…only now do I see how difficult it must be for my clients, so-called (or perchance genuine) writers, to wrestle with unvarnished matter, objective reality, the entire phenomenological world , in order to reach the essence that glimmers behind it---that is, if any such thing exists, of course. In most cases, one sets off from the premise that it does exist, because one is unable to reconcile oneself to the inessentiality of one’s life…” Reality is, “totally incomprehensible and unknowable as it is, through being shielded from us by our imagination…”. But what is a reality, what is the past when both are constructed from the imaginations, even within the ambit of a single life, of hundreds if not thousands of people and interactions, all of which shape, determine and continually reconstruct the past and hence the present and even the future?

B’s life is doubly damned. The survivor’s guilt that he lives with is compounded hugely by the fact that he was born in Auschwitz….the spark of a new life brought forth in the cauldron of a circle of hell beyond even the imagination of Dante. Small wonder that for B, “…people have lost their flair for greatness [in all forms of art] and only their flair for murder has persisted, though undoubtedly they have refined the latter, their flair for murder, to an art, almost to the point of greatness…”. This is true and must stand as the greatest, most horrific legacy of the 20th century.

What is the role of writing in such a world? It provides the only framework within which one might try to make sense of life because it at least forces some thought and structure onto whatever is reality: “If you have a concept of the world, if you have not yet forgotten all that has happened, that you have a world at all, it is writing that has created it for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it; Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together.”

This has become a rather lengthy review of a relatively short book, but it is a book replete with challenging thoughts and concepts. Highly recommended.

http://momentarytaste.blogspot.com/2009/11/liquidation-imre-kert.html ( )