Liquidation

A brief, head-in-the-clouds novel by Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz, Liquidation is tentative, overwrought, and ultimately unsatisfying. But there are moments of shining clarity, mostly in the meditations on the role of literature in life. "Man lives as a worm but writes as a god" comes to mind as one of the lines that repay the two or three hours spent with this book.