Liquidation

a novel

de Imre Kertész

Ten years have passed since the fall of Communism. B.–a writer of high literary reputation whose birth and survival in Auschwitz defied all probability–has taken his own life. Among his papers, his friend Kingbitter discovers a play titled Liquidation in which he reads an eerie foretelling of the personal and political crises that he and B.’s other friends now face: having survived the Holocaust and the years of Communist rule, having experienced the surge of hopefulness that rose from the rubble of the Wall, they are left with little but a sense of chaos and an utter loss of identity.