Liquidation

Imre Kertész · 1929–2016 · Hungary

Originally Felszámolás (Hungarian)

Why it matters

A Budapest editor hunts for the novel his late friend B., an Auschwitz survivor, seems to have written and destroyed before taking his own life: a manuscript that already knew how its author would end. Kertész's spare, self-devouring coda to Fatelessness.

At a glance

A metafictional search for a maybe-nonexistent manuscript, nested inside the very text searching for it.