Review of “Liquidation”, by Imre Kertész, by Alberto Hernández

1

B commits suicide and pushes his friend Keserü to search like crazy for a novel that the former would have left unpublished. The writer who has died forces Keserü to turn his strange life into a biography that the reader discovers as a mask from which the perverse face of a concentration camp emerges: Auschwitz.

The extermination camp, erotic and amorous adventures, books that never ended, but also politics as an assemblage of a reality that convulsed Hungary, are part of this experience that discovers the character of a narrator as important as Kertész, who always he writes under the weight of his prominence as a victim of Nazism.

2

The author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. Born in 1929, once freed from Hitler’s chains, he was invited to go to France, but he gave up and stayed to be, once again, a victim of the sickle and the sickle. hammer of the soviets.

In this work the author shows part of the sociopolitical reality of the country. It focuses more on the psychology of B, on that writer who left a novel but did not appear anywhere because his originals were cremated as B requested a little before he died. This event, a sort of simile of the gas chambers in the extermination camps, provokes a commotion in the friend, since he hoped to find in the novel more elements to know about his friend, once it was published. It was a work that would have an indisputable success, but the work, as Kafka wanted with his, was burned, unlike that of the Czech that was taken to the press and known throughout the world.

3

Keserü is a journalist, printer, reader, man of writing, but of someone else’s, of those who write. That is why his interest in publishing the work of the dead friend, who left stories, notes, revelations that emerged as imprints in each outburst of lucidity or darkness of his talent. Creative madness led him to express that his work had no meaning, quality or acceptance. He did not want them to know him, to know his secrets, his loves, his “liquidation.”

The technique used by the Hungarian novelist gives rise to a theatrical work, because it combines prose with a script through which dialogues, actions and monologues pass that allow to extend the reading.

The reader of this book may feel some discomfort at the little certainty that the narrator provides about the novel he is eagerly looking for, until he discovers that it has been burned. That is, the failure of his search ends in the strictest solitude.

The screen of a computer and the shadows of the night determine the closing of this story. Both B and Keserü are part of a long silence.

4

Judit shudders first and then protests vividly. Novel? He does not know of any novels.

“What novel are you talking about, for God’s sake?”

“The one that ended before his death.” And that he gave you in manuscript or typewritten form.

“If I only knew where you got that from.” Did he say something to you? Did you write it somewhere? In your will, in a letter or …

“Look, Judit, I may only have known until now that you have the manuscript, but now I’m convinced of it.”

-Really?

“Why don’t you have to give it to me?”

“For one simple reason: because it doesn’t exist.”

But the book, the manuscript, did exist, only it was already ash. By order of B he ended up at the campfire, like the memory of those who in Auschwitz ended up gassed, incinerated.

Judit was ordered to do so, but denied to the end that such a novel existed. But there was, as there were death, mass graves, the “heil Hitler”, the swastika, broken glass, the sacrifice of millions of Jews.

The novel was the hint so that there was no memory of a story that had happened to B, a kind of alter ego of Kertész, who suffered the rigor of those who declared war on the world and became protagonists of the long list of killers of humanity.

Venezuelan poet, narrator, journalist and pedagogue (Calabozo, 1952). He resides in Maracay, Aragua. In 2020 he was appointed a corresponding member of the Venezuelan Academy of Language by the state of Aragua. He has a postgraduate degree in Latin American literature at the Simón Bolívar University (USB) and was the founder of the magazine Umbra. He has published, among other titles, the poetry books The moss mockery (1980), Amazon (1981), Last instance (1989), Sunstroke eyelid (1989), Outside eyes (1989), Nortes (1991), Attempts and exile (nineteen ninety six), Surface beasts (1998), Poetics of folly (2001), In someone else’s mouth: poetic anthology 1980-2001 (2001), Land that I am from (2002), The poem of the city (2003), The Everyday Sky: Poetry in Transit (2008), Galina Gates (2010), The offense exercises (2010), Stravaganza (2012), Clothing (2012) and 70 bourgeois poems (2014). He has also published the essay books New criticism of Venezuelan theater (1981) and Notes to the hare (1999); the story books Fragments of the same memory (1994), Short film (1999), Virginities and other challenges (2000) and Fascist tales (2012), the novel The only hour (2016) and the books of chronicles Valles de Aragua, the visible region (1999) and Shadow shift (2001). He directed the cultural supplement Content, From the newspaper The Periodiquito (Maracay), where he also served as director, editorial secretary and editor of the political source. Post regularly on Create in Salamanca (Spain), in Cervantes @ MileHighCity (Denver, United States) and in different blogs in Venezuela and other countries. His essays and literary writings have been published in the newspapers The National, The universal, Last News and The Carabobeño, among others. Part of his work has been translated into English, Italian, Portuguese and Arabic. With the novel The poetic nerve won the XVII Transgender Prize of the Foundation for Urban Culture (2018).

Your texts published before 2015
12 • 104 • 119 • 189 • 208 • 209 • 210 • 211 • 212 • 213 • 216 • 217 • 222 • 224 • 225 • 226 • 227 • 242 • 259 • 284 • 290 • 297 • 299
Letralia City: Chronicles of oblivion
Editorial Letralia: Freedom of expression, power and censorship (co-author)
Editorial Letralia: Passing Clouds (Poems for Japan)
Editorial Letralia: Bend on the rocks. 18 years of Letralia (co-author)

Latest entries by Alberto Hernández (see everything)