"Kertész has his eyes on the 20th century's varied efforts toward the liquidation of anything recognizable as human personality. "We are living in an age of disaster; each of us is a carrier of the disease," B. decrees in one of many flashbacks. "Disaster man has no fate, no qualities, no character." … Fatelessness is an eerie and painful novel, shocking not for its by-now familiar subject matter, but for the tone of earnest goodwill with which the young narrator attempts to understand his situation. (In one passage he discovers fleas feasting on his open wounds and, despite his horror, considers the insects' hunger and concludes that, "taking everything into account, I could see it their way.") In 1990's excellent Kaddish for an Unborn Child — which, sadly, completes the slim triad of Kertész's works available in English — he explains (via B.) that "one's religious duty, totally independent of the crippling religions of crippling churches, is . . . understanding the world." And with brutal intellectual rigor, Kertész does his best, refusing to let the Holocaust be sacralized as some mythical exception that stands outside of history, or as an untouchable sinkhole of meaning. The Nazi genocide is not an inexplicable catastrophe for Kertész, it's a given, the channel through which the world must be understood. … Liquidation is a profoundly melancholy book, wrestling not just with the legacy of the Holocaust, but with the decades of authoritarianism and disappointment that followed. … Liquidation is at its core a book about writing, about trying to tell stories that resist being told."