This book started off promising for me. It is impossible to say the language of this book is of a register I had been lacking in some of the recent fiction I had been reading. But what first presented itself as appealing, it soon lost its flavor for me.

I wanted to like the book. I just moved to Hungary two weeks ago and was excited to partake in the country's celebrated author and only recipient of the Noble Prize for Literature. I found myself dissatisfied at many points as I read, however, and I wish I could give it a higher rating (I fluctuated between 2 or 3 stars).

Overall, there was a forcefullness that became harder and harder to swallow. The lofty nature of the propositions offered to me, the continually digressing mixed with philosophizing became too chaotic. I am accustomed to non-linear story telling, but this time around it failed me. The jumps between settings and which character was speaking and sometimes speech dictated in quotations, sometimes as part of the prose--it was so sudden and subtle that I found myself more lost than I should have been. I don't believe it was the author's intention, so much, either.

The fact that this is a translated work is readily apparent to me. At many points throughout the work, the syntax felt...off is I guess the only word for it. Additionally, there were some moments where the word choice just did not ring true. From what I have learned from Hungarian so far, it seems so far at odds with English structures that I am certain I am lacking a great deal of the beauty of the book in this translated form.

When the book became more straightforward, I enjoyed it. It's also not to say there weren't some good lines among the philosophizing that made me think. Yet, in the end, I simply do not feel attached to the characters (Kingbitter was such a whiny prick, in my opinion) and the statements I believe the author was trying to make. It very much alienated me as it reinforced how I would never be able to understand Auschwitz from the perspective of someone who is connected to it through family or religious ties. I already understood that I would never be able to understand, even before I read this. The book just made me feel even further away. For this reason, I do not think I will read Fateless(ness), his other and most famous work, simply because it also centers around the encounters there and I fear I will have similar issues with this author's style.

He did not understand how I imagined Florence was not a Florence of murderers when everything nowadays belongs to murderers.

If things were left up to the people who view social justice movements as inevitable, they'd all be dead or enslaved or worse, and everyone who's already dead or enslaved or worse would be wiped from history entirely. These are the people for whom there are no monsters under the bed, or on the streets, or speaking in front of a podium, so what, exactly, will spawn a surge towards liberty? Ethical capitalism? Choosing one military industrial complex over another for reasons of the novelty of gender? Being polite and kind and grateful to those who have hinted very strongly over the years that they'd like nothing more than to shoot those you profess to be friends with in the face? Now, you can't apply [b:Liquidation|318337|Liquidation|Imre Kertész|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348289499s/318337.jpg|309127] to all genocides or governments that favor the use of torture as a means for justice, as that'll only result in the annihilation that is one of the characters claiming that everyone is Jewish, thus signifying Jewish people have only other Jewish people to blame for their oppression. You can, however, refer back to it if you ever feel the need to tell those being subversive or antagonizing or contemptuous of the status quo that it's really not that bad; if they see fit to exit stage left, all they need to do is be a dear and leave behind some masterwork for us to incorporate while leaving their trials and tribulations far behind.

The problem with reading books like this is it makes one unfit for reading practically everything else. Why read something that doesn't in some way deal with one systematic erasure or another? Will it make you happy when the bombs come? Will it save you and your offspring when what you could never have imagined comes to pass? Sure, you need to make a paycheck, but you can do that while facing the fact that you're able to do so only through stepping on the backs of others, right? Perhaps we need to raise the bar of adulthood from the level of the ability to do taxes, brown-nose, and beat one's children to something involving an engagement with reality that doesn't think Israel absolutely had to happen, and that the most one can be is ethically political, not apolitical. There's another side of this that talks about the right one has to kill themself, but there are so many do-gooder eugenicists pretending they're anything but a less popular branch than their Nazi cousins using disabled people as poster faces to support their argument that they've reduced the issue to little more than pull yourself up by your bootstraps ethnic cleansing. There are other sides that talk about communism and metafiction and Judaism, but you're going to have to go somewhere else for that. Preferably to someone who's Jewish. They, unlike practically all others, will not be pulling out the Shoah as a rhetorical trump card.

This being without Self is the disaster, the true Evil, said Bee, though, comically enough, without your being evil yourself, albeit capable of any evil act.

This book will make you think if you let it. Sure, the fictional tricks are cute, but you're engaging with literature, not the latest release of the iPhone cult. You could try your hardest to avoid thinking about how all this horrible things happened and keep on happening, but then what exactly are you doing reading Kertész in the first place. You'd be better off with Kafka, whose deathbed wishes were violated for the sake of your entertainment and academic wankery, or with any number of writers who were defanged by their decision to not burn their works. Survival of the fittest, remember? Anything can be made to fit once the troublesome implements are reduced and the survivors are domesticated.

The state is always the same. The only reason it financed literature up till now was in order to liquidate it.

Do you kill yourself to avoid conformation? Or do you not kill yourself because, no matter what happens, you can never be conformed? Whatever the case, you'll be proof of the system, living or dead.



P.S. This is my 501st review. I missed the 500th mark for whatever reason, but better late than never. Such a ways I have come.

Kertesz won the Nobel Price in Literature "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history." I'm not sure I understand what that means, but I think it describes his writing. Haunting, dark, plodding - the author's own experiences in Buchenwald and Auschwitz provide the foundation for his narrative. A book I might need to read several more times in order to more fully understand.

Beautifully written.

A very Central European dose of introspection that mixes quite radical departures in style (there is a a text-within-a-text-within-a-text) and some pretty heavy intellectual chicanery in the way that it constructs its existential dilemma in the face of the existence of Auschwitz.

There is a fair whack of self-reflexivity here, as once again Kertész mulls the weighty shadow of the camp that he spent part of his childhood. This is an intensely postmodern piece, fragmented to the point of distraction and filled with an incredibly morbid sadness. You can't help that the author is an incredibly unhappy man, unhappy in the way that constantly asserts that happiness is not actually possible. The immediate post-Communist Hungarian setting (and dark shadow of the Holocaust) adds to the claustrophobic atmosphere.

Not for the faint-hearted.