For a man who spent most of 50 years thinking about suicide, Imre Kertész wears a broad smile. His new novel, Liquidation, concerns a Holocaust survivor named B. who writes a play in which he is a character. At the end of the play, also called Liquidation, the character B. commits suicide. As Kertész's novel begins, B. himself commits suicide, leaving behind questions of his motivation. This paradox, that survival sometimes means death, is at the root of all Kertész's work. I recently caught up with dapper Nobel Prize laureate on his 75th birthday.
How did you start this novel?
I should say that Liquidation spent quite some time in the pipeline. It also took different forms before it materialized. Straight after the 1989 change of the political system in Hungary, I was actually intent on writing a drama. But a piece of work is something you either sit down to write it or you never write it. As time goes by, as time passes, it becomes a novel, because time is associated with novels.
How did the Holocaust change your conception of reality?
I wrote four different novels that actually approach the Holocaust from four different perspectives. The first one, Fatelessness, is actually placed in the concentration camp itself. I would not want to call it a Holocaust novel. The Holocaust is not something you write novels about. A novel is not comprehensive enough to actually depict the Holocaust. It's more, perhaps, a moral or a spiritual journey that you depict, the journey of your soul to a concentration camp. And it deals with the ethical consequences of survival, the ethical consequences of the Holocaust itself.
The second novel is called Fiasco. It deals with the Holocaust in an indirect, manner, while at the same time depicts the Communist or Nazi regime.
The third is the Kaddish for an Unborn Child. That really is the novel about a survivor. A Holocaust survivor gets married, and in marriage he finds out that he is incapable of true love, incapable of rearing a child.
Is that a viewpoint you share?
No. The lead figure in a novel will always take something from the author. This one would be so autobiographical; everyone always thought that this is my story. Regardless of this, I actually do not have any children, but it has nothing to do with this, so it's not theory behind reality.
And this brings us to Liquidation.
Liquidation is the last in the line and the fourth perspective. We're actually confronted with the Holocaust indirectly, through the person my heroine loves, through her parents, but she herself is not actually directly involved. She ends up having to decide, having to choose between normal everyday life and frustration. Frustrations that are the legacies of the Holocaust.
When did you know you were going to be a writer?
In 1954 to 1955, Hungary was on its path, going toward Stalinism. It seemed a completely senseless decision because the real decision, my resolution, was to become an independent writer; a writer who is not actually going to play according to the rules of socialist literature, so I never dared share this with anyone because they would have thought I was mad.
And you worked on musical comedies during this time, too?
For a long, long time, yes. Basically, that helped me finance my writing Fatelessness. These were absolutely written for the purpose of making a living, and I was actually very conscious of making sure they have absolutely no literary value.
Why do you think that it took so long for Fatelessness to be translated?
I should say, really, that it was unfavorable circumstances. The novel was finally published [in the US] in a rather mistranslated version. These new translations by Tim Wilkinson are the ones that I really would adopt.
This kind of occurrence often seems to be the case with literature in translation.
That is very rightly said, because the topic [of Fatelessness] itself is so delicate, it was probably shocking for the translator, or the person translating. Many times the radical nature doesn't come out. It's too PC the way it was translated. One could say they are being perhaps a bit too lenient on the reader. However, these new versions, the new translations, are real depictions of the novel written in Hungarian.
How do you feel about being better interpreted in Germany rather than Hungary at the time of winning the Nobel?
That's a fact. Germany was the first place where my works, my literature, actually had an impact that was palpable, that was measurable. That doesn't mean that there are no readers in Hungary that read my novels. When it comes to the impact, it was always much more palpable in Germany, at first.
Several writers who were in concentration camps—Paul Celan, Primo Levi—committed suicide. Was that on your mind in creating the hero of Liquidation?
Suicide was something that was constantly on my mind. You constantly, constantly think about the idea of suicide, especially if you live under a dictatorship. Albert Camus said suicide is the single philosophical problem. You could also look at it this way: Every single novel that I write gives me time before suicide.
Keep writing!
However, in retrospect, when I really look back on those really dark ages between the 1960s and the 1990s, when it comes to suicides and the suicide games—and when I use this word, I use it in the serious interpretation of Goethe—I do have a sense of longing for it. Back then it gave me very fertile ground for my thoughts to develop.