{"product_id":"liquidation-isbn-9781400075058","title":"Liquidation","description":"\u003cp\u003eImre Kertész’s savagely lyrical and suspenseful new novel traces the continuing echoes  the Holocaust and communism in the consciousness of contemporary Eastern Europe.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTen 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—\u003ci\u003eLiquidation\u003c\/i\u003e becomes an inquest into the deeply compromised inner  life of a generation. The result is moving, revelatory and haunting.\u003c\/p\u003e“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.” –\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review \u003c\/i\u003e  “A judgmentÉon the human spiritÉ. By turns sardonic, watchful andÉbitterly despairing.” –\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003eImre Kertész, who was born in 1929 and imprisoned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a youth, worked as a journalist and playwright before publishing \u003ci\u003eFatelessness\u003c\/i\u003e, his first novel, in 1975. He is the author of \u003ci\u003eLooking for a Clue, Detective Story, The Failure, The Union Jack, Kaddish for an Unborn Child,\u003c\/i\u003e and A \u003ci\u003eGalley-Slave’s Journal\u003c\/i\u003e. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. He lives in Budapest and Berlin.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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEven his father was already called that.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis grandfather too.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKingbitter 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKingbitter, 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn 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  from a bundle of rags, laid out by alcohol or drugs, or maybe both.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs he looked at the down-and-outs, Kingbitter all at once became  conscious that he was again looking at the down-and-outs. Without  doubt, Kingbitter was nowadays lavishing far too much attention on the  down-and-outs. He was quite capable of frittering away whole half hours  of his (as it happened, worthless) time by the window, with the  captivation of a voyeur who is completely unable to tear himself away  from the obscene spectacle unfolding before him. On top of which, this  Peeping Tom behavior was for Kingbitter attended by a sense of guilt  and, at one and the same time, a loathsome attraction which debouched  ultimately into a form of nauseating anguish or existential angst. The  moment this anguish took unmistakable shape within him, Kingbitter,  having attained as it were his baffling activity’s even more baffling  goal, would turn away from the window with almost an air of  satisfaction and step toward the table, on which were strewn various  manuscripts, opened and spread out like the carcasses of birds.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKingbitter himself was well aware that there was something unsettling  about this obsessive link that he had developed, one could say without  his knowledge and consent, with the down-and-outs. In truth, he  suffered from it as from an illness. All he needed to do was decide not  to step toward the window anymore. Or to step toward the window solely  in order to blow the cobwebs away or for some other practical purpose  of that kind. But then, all at once, he would again catch himself at  the window looking at the down-and-outs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKingbitter suspected that some intelligible meaning lay hidden behind  this curious passion of his. Indeed, he had a feeling that if he were  to succeed in deciphering that meaning, then he would also have a  better understanding of his life, which he did not understand nowadays.  He had a feeling as if nowadays rifts were separating him from that  formerly almost palpable constant that he at some time had been  acquainted with as his personality. For Kingbitter the Hamlet question  did not run “To be or not to be?” but “Am I or am I not?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKingbitter leafed almost distractedly through one of the typescripts  that was sprawled on the table. It was a fairly bulky pile of paper,  the manuscript of a play. On the cover sheet stood the title,  liquidation, then the designation of its genre: Comedy in Three Acts.  Below that: The setting is Budapest, in 1990. He grasped the sheet  between finger and thumb so as to turn the page, but then gave way  nonetheless to the dubious pleasure bestowed by the stage directions:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e(A dingy editorial office in a dingy publishing house. Shabby walls,  sagging book stacks, yawning gaps between the books stowed on the  shelves, dust, neglect; although there are no signs that a move is  under way, the desolate impermanence of a moving operation prevails all  around. In the room are four desks, four work spaces. On each desk are  a typewriter—a dust cover on one or two of them—piles of books,  manuscript sheets, files. The windows overlook a courtyard. At the rear  is a door leading to a corridor. Somewhere in the distance there is  late-morning sunlight; in the dingy editorial office, dingy artificial  lighting.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKürti and his wife, Sarah, and Dr. Obláth are present in the room, ill  at ease as they sit waiting around a desk that, as will become clear,  belongs to Kingbitter.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKingbitter began to be seized by the passion to read on, the strange  obsession that had so decisively shaped his life. He liked the play’s  opening exchanges.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKürti: Abominable. Execrable. I could throw up. This building. A palace  once, you know. Those stairs. This room. All this.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eObláth (to Sarah): Tell me, do you know what he’s on about?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSarah: He’s bored.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eObláth: I’m also bored. You’re also bored.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSarah: But he’s radically bored; that’s the only radicalism he has now.  That’s what has been left him from the glory days. Boredom. He takes it  with him everywhere, like an angry shaggy terrier that he sets on  others from time to time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKürti: We were ordered to be here for eleven . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSarah (in a mollifying, almost pleading tone, as if speaking to a  child): No one “ordered” us. Kingbitter asked us to bring the material  into the office. By eleven, if possible.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKürti: Eleven-thirty, and not a soul around. That doesn’t bother you  two, of course. You just sit there and tolerate it, the same way  everything in this country is tolerated. Every deception, every lie,  every bullet in the brains. Just as you are already tolerating bullets  in the brains that will be implemented only after the bullet is put in  your brains.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKingbitter laughed out loud. Or, to be more precise, he heard the  distinctive curt snort that nowadays passed for a laugh with him. The  sound welled up, so to say, from the belly and came out more as a dry  grunt than a laugh; to be sure, there was not much in the way of mirth  and happiness tinkling in it. He leafed on in the manuscript until his  eye was again caught by a stage direction:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e(Kingbitter hurries in, a thick file under his arm.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKingbitter: Do forgive me. It couldn’t be helped. Sorry, sorry. The  conference ran way overtime.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSarah: You look stressed. Did something happen?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKingbitter: Nothing special; the publishing house is to be liquidated,  that’s all. The state is not going to throw money at the losses any  longer. It has financed them for forty years; from today onward it is  not going to finance them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eObláth: That’s logical. It’s another state now.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKürti: The state is always the same. The only reason it financed  literature up till now was in order to liquidate it. Giving state  support to literature is the state’s sneaky way for the state  liquidation of literature.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eObláth (in ironic acknowledgment): An axiomatic formulation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSarah: And what is to become of the publishing house? Will it cease to  exist?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKingbitter: In its present form. (He shrugs, a bit dejectedly.) But  then, everything and everyone is ceasing to exist in its present form.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYes, Kingbitter well recalled that morning nine years before. He  recalled how, having come out of the editorial conference (the  so-called editorial conference), a thick file under his arm, he had  entered that room. Kürti, Sarah, and Obláth had been waiting for him  there, by his desk. He himself had said near enough exactly what was in  the play. The only snag was that by the time that scene was played out  in reality, almost word for word, the person who had written the play,  and that scene in it, was no longer alive.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe had committed suicide.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe police had found the syringe and the morphine ampoules as well.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKingbitter had retained sufficient presence of mind to rescue the bulk  of the manuscripts (a dazed Sarah had taken possession of the scanty  correspondence) before the authorities arrived.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe had found this stage work too among the private papers. A good nine  years ago, when Kingbitter had first read the play, the story was only  just beginning, and it had soon carried on, with the character the play  called Kingbitter—exactly like the real-life Kingbitter—retaining  sufficient presence of mind at the scene of the suicide to rescue the  bulk of the manuscripts before the authorities arrived. Then, having  secured the literary haul and greedily set upon it, Kingbitter had come  across the stage work and, shortly afterward, the scene in which it  turns out that he had retained sufficient presence of mind,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eet cetera. Thereafter, the scenes had succeeded one another, turn and  turn about, in the drama as in reality, to the point that, in the end,  Kingbitter did not know what to admire more: the author’s—his dead  friend’s—crystal-clear foresight or his own, so to say, remorseful  determination to identify with his prescribed role and stick to the  story.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNowadays, though, with the lapse of nine years, Kingbitter was  interested in something else. His story had reached an end, but he  himself was still here, posing a problem for which he more and more put  off finding a solution. He would either have to carry on his story,  which had proved impossible, or else start a new story, which had  proved equally impossible. Kingbitter undoubtedly could see solutions  to hand, both better ones and worse; indeed, if he reflected more  deeply, solutions were all he could see, rather than lives. The  character named Kürti in the play, for instance, had nowadays opted for  the solution of falling ill. The last time Kingbitter paid a visit to  him, he had found him in bed, surrounded by a sphygmomanometer, a  little table on which were tablets of varied hues and shapes, packs of  medicines, even a tiny gadget with which Kürti could self-inject; Sarah  was sitting apathetically in the kitchen. This Kürti had once been a  sociologist, retreating into some insignificant job during the  seventies and eighties and meanwhile writing with unflagging zest his  big monograph “on untimely consciousness and its cognitive roots in  Hungary.” Prior to that he had even done time in prison, and though the  secret police were no longer beating prisoners by then, they had still  managed to land a blow so wretchedly that he had gone deaf in his left  ear.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKingbitter leafed back a few sheets in the play. We are back again at  the opening scene, with Kürti, his wife, Sarah, and Dr. Obláth waiting  for him, Kingbitter. Obláth says something, Kürti does not understand  him, and Obláth repeats it at the top of his lungs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSarah: There’s no need to yell. Just don’t speak into his battered ear.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eObláth (awkwardly apologetic): I always forget!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKürti (who has meanwhile set off on a walk around the room, inspects  the bookshelves and furnishings, picks out\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ea book or two): Better you do. It was all over and done with long ago.  (He rummages tentatively among the books, seeming to speak more or less  in a trance.) And strangely enough, it all came to an end just  recently. Quite suddenly. Just when it was in the home stretch. The  régime was overthrown, and I’m not going to pretend it was me who  overthrew it. A general liquidation is in full swing, and I’m not going  to join in. I’ve become a spectator. And I’m not even spectating from  the front rows in the stalls but from somewhere up in the gods. Maybe  I’m worn out, but it could be that I never truly believed in what I  believed. That would be the unseemlier alternative, because then they  would have smashed my ear in for no reason at all. That is the  assumption I’m inclining to these days. (He breaks off and ponders,  book in hand.) I did time for no reason, dragged the millstone of a  police record around for no reason, was on probation for years for no  reason, and I’m no hero, I merely botched up my life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eObláth (consolingly): Everyone here makes a botch of his life. That’s  the local specialty, the genius loci. Anyone who doesn’t botch up his  life here simply has no talent.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKingbitter again heard the laugh that sounded more like an irate snort  than a laugh. He regretted that he had missed that scene (he recalled  that he had entered the room only later, with the thick file under his  arm) and so had been unable to take part in the conversation. He liked  the style, that wry gallows humor armed with the semblance of  omniscience; a most serviceable style it was, the dialect of the  initiated, protecting them from their disillusionments, their fears,  their well-concealed childish hopes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKingbitter looked at his watch and established that he had nothing at  all to do that day either. It was slowly getting on for noon. He  fleetingly wondered how he had spent his day so far, but he would have  been hard put to give an answer to that. True, he had been living a  lively interior life today: he had dreamed something, he had awoken  with an erection, and while shaving he had been dogged by a feeling  that today he needed to decide, though he could not see clearly what it  was he needed to decide, besides which he was all too aware of his own  inability to make any decisions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDespite that, the thought did cross Kingbitter’s mind that he ought to  do something about finding a theater to do the play, the comedy (or  tragedy?) “Liquidation.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe was now in the ninth year of considering that.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIndeed, Kingbitter was now in the ninth year of considering whether he  was handling the literary estate with due diligence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere were all sorts of things in the legacy: prose pieces and notes,  diary extracts and embryonic short stories (and the play Liquidation,  of course). It was just that a crucial bit was missing—or at least so  Kingbitter was convinced.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eApart from which—and this was Kingbitter’s most secret thought, so  secret that he maybe kept it a secret even from himself—if he were to  be rid of the play, he would, in some sense, also be getting rid of  himself. He might also be rid of the oppressive sense of implausibility  that stuck to him nowadays, haunting him like some disagreeable  deficiency, at all times and in all places, like Peter Schlemihl and  his missing shadow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe story had begun on that morning when Kingbitter, thick file under  his arm, had entered the publishing office where Kürti, his wife,  Sarah, and Dr. Obláth were waiting for him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the file in question was the literary estate of Kingbitter’s dead  friend—let’s call him B. for short (or Bee, as he liked to call  himself). The way the estate had come into Kingbitter’s hands was that  Kingbitter had retained sufficient presence of mind to rescue the bulk  of the manuscripts before . . . but he has already had occasion to  mention that.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKingbitter had appeared at the editorial conference (the so-called  editorial conference) that morning, file under his arm, with the firm  intention of recommending that the publishing house, of which he was  one of the literary editors, publish the legacy, and offering himself  to undertake the editorial work relating to publication (forgoing any  fees, naturally).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eExcept that the conference had been convened in order to announce the  sad fact that the publishing house was operating at a loss, and for  that reason they would be obliged to undertake certain administrative  and financial maneuvers, from the stupefyingly tedious analysis of  which all that Kingbitter grasped—but grasped with utter clarity—was  that he would be ill advised to bring up the matter of his  recommendation at this moment in time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe again began to take an interest in what they had actually been  talking about before he, having left the so-called conference, entered  the room where his friends were awaiting him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eObláth has just been discoursing on something in his habitual,  passionately high-flown manner, his words followed by a prolonged hush.  Sarah is sniffling, occasionally raising her handkerchief to dab her  reddened eyes; Kürti drags his chair a bit farther away and wraps  himself in a detached, profound silence.Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305427587301,"sku":"NP9781400075058","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400075058.jpg?v=1767731503","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/liquidation-isbn-9781400075058","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}