Reflecting on Imre Kertesz's experiences of the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation of Hungary, this title likens the ideological machinery of National Socialism to the oppressive routines of life under communism.
Kingbitter, an editor at a publishing house on the verge of closure, believes himself to have been the closest friend of a celebrated writer and Auschwitz survivor, B, who recently committed suicide.
Gyuri, a fourteen-year-old Hungarian Jew, gets the day off school to witness his father signing over the family timber business to the firm's bookkeeper - his final business transaction before being sent to a labour camp.
Now in prison, Antonio Martens is a torturer for the secret police of a defunct dictatorship. He requests and is given writing materials in his cell, and what he has to recount is his involvement in the surveillance, torture, and assassination of Federigo and Enrique Salinas, a prominent father and son.
As Kertesz's narrator addresses the child he couldn't bear to bring into the world, he takes readers on a mesmerising, lyrical journey through his life, from his childhood to Auschwitz to his failed marriage.
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