Liquidation - Imre Kertesz

What would a publisher's reader be with belief, an intellectual challenge, in a censored, evil, and illiterate world? No one an nothing. A paper-marking slave, a proofreader groping in the dark. But I believe in writing--nothing else; just writing. Man may live like a worm, but he writes like a god. There was a time when that secret was known, but now it has been forgotten; the world is composed of disintegrating fragments, an incoherent dark chaos, sustained by writing alone. 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 that for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it; Logos, the invisible spider's thread that holds our lives together.

Liquidation is a rich, dense novel from the Nobel winning author, Imre Kertesz. A short novel, it is dense with ideas and reflections on the human condition. A survivor of Auschwitz, this book includes a plot that involves other affected that death camp. Kertesz's writing style, sparse and somewhat detached, allows him to cover vast subjects and plots with ease in this short novel. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and highly recommend it.