-14% $13.75$13.75
FREE delivery May 17 - 23
Ships from: Yanakman Sold by: Yanakman
$11.66$11.66
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: SLICK DEALS 4 ALL
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Liquidation Paperback – October 25, 2005
Purchase options and add-ons
Imre Kertész’s savagely lyrical and suspenseful new novel traces the continuing echoes the Holocaust and communism in the consciousness of contemporary Eastern Europe.
Ten years after the fall of communism, a writer named B. commits suicide, devastating his circle and deeply puzzling his friend Kingsbitter. For among B.’s effects, Kingsbitter finds a play that eerily predicts events after his death. Why did B.—who was born at Auschwitz and miraculously survived–take his life? As Kingsbitter searches for the answer—and for the novel he is convinced lies hidden among his friend’s papers—Liquidation becomes an inquest into the deeply compromised inner life of a generation. The result is moving, revelatory and haunting.
- Print length129 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateOctober 25, 2005
- Dimensions5.19 x 0.36 x 8 inches
- ISBN-10140007505X
- ISBN-13978-1400075058
Books with Buzz
Discover the latest buzz-worthy books, from mysteries and romance to humor and nonfiction. Explore more
Frequently bought together
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
Review
From the Back Cover
Ten years have passed since the fall of Communism. B.-a writer of high literary reputation whose birth and survival in Auschwitz defied all probability-has taken his own life. Among his papers, his friend Kingbitter discovers a play titled "Liquidation in which he reads an eerie foretelling of the personal and political crises that he and B.'s other friends now face: having survived the Holocaust and the years of Communist rule, having experienced the surge of hopefulness that rose from the rubble of the Wall, they are left with little but a sense of chaos and an utter loss of identity.
Kingbitter, desperate to understand his friend's suicide, begins a furious search for the novel he believes might be among B.'s papers and might provide the key. But the search takes him in unexpected directions: deep into his own memories and into those of B.'s ex-wife, Judith, the hidden corners of their lives revealed-to themselves and to us-at the same time as the mystery of B.'s life is slowly unraveled.
An intricately layered story of history and humanity-powerful, disturbing, lyrical, achingly suspenseful, brilliantly told.
"From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Even his father was already called that.
His grandfather too.
Kingbitter was accordingly registered on his birth certificate under the name Kingbitter: that, therefore, is the reality, on which—reality, that is to say—Kingbitter did not set too much store nowadays. Nowadays—a late year of the passing millennium, in the early spring of, let us say, 1999, on a sunny morning at that—reality had become a problematic concept for Kingbitter, but, more serious still, a problematic state. A state from which, on the report of Kingbitter’s most private feelings, it was reality above all that was lacking. If he were in some way compelled to make use of the word, Kingbitter invariably added “so-called reality.” That, however, was a very meager satisfaction; nor indeed did it satisfy Kingbitter.
Kingbitter, as he did frequently nowadays, was standing at his window and looking out onto the street below. This street offered the most mundane and ordinary sights of Budapest’s mundane and ordinary streets. The muck-, oil-, and dog-dirt-spattered sidewalk was lined with parked cars, and in the one-yard gaps between the cars and the leprotically peeling house walls the most mundane and ordinary passersby were attempting to go about their business, their hostile features an outward clue to their dark thoughts. Every now and then, perhaps in a hurry to overtake the single file inching along in front, one of them would step off the sidewalk, only for an entire chorus of rancorous car horns to give the lie to any groundless hope of breaking free from the line.
On the benches in the square over the way, at least the benches not already stripped of their planks, were perched the homeless of the area, with their bundles, shopping bags, and plastic flasks. Above a bushy beard sprouted a knitted cap of carmine red, its dangling bobble merrily brushing the forbidding fuzz. A man wearing the battered cap of an officer of some nonexistent army was in a faded, buttonless heavy overcoat bound by a coy silk belt of gaudy floral design that had no doubt once belonged to a woman’s housecoat. On bunioned female feet, peeking from beneath a pair of jeans, silvered evening shoes with worn-down heels; farther off, on a narrow strip of sparse turf, legs drawn up in catatonic inertness, sprawled a figure indistinguishable from a bundle of rags, laid out by alcohol or drugs, or maybe both.
As he looked at the down-and-outs, Kingbitter all at once became conscious that he was again looking at the down-and-outs. Without doubt, Kingbitter was nowadays lavishing far too much attention on the down-and-outs. He was quite capable of frittering away whole half hours of his (as it happened, worthless) time by the window, with the captivation of a voyeur who is completely unable to tear himself away from the obscene spectacle unfolding before him. On top of which, this Peeping Tom behavior was for Kingbitter attended by a sense of guilt and, at one and the same time, a loathsome attraction which debouched ultimately into a form of nauseating anguish or existential angst. The moment this anguish took unmistakable shape within him, Kingbitter, having attained as it were his baffling activity’s even more baffling goal, would turn away from the window with almost an air of satisfaction and step toward the table, on which were strewn various manuscripts, opened and spread out like the carcasses of birds.
Kingbitter himself was well aware that there was something unsettling about this obsessive link that he had developed, one could say without his knowledge and consent, with the down-and-outs. In truth, he suffered from it as from an illness. All he needed to do was decide not to step toward the window anymore. Or to step toward the window solely in order to blow the cobwebs away or for some other practical purpose of that kind. But then, all at once, he would again catch himself at the window looking at the down-and-outs.
Kingbitter suspected that some intelligible meaning lay hidden behind this curious passion of his. Indeed, he had a feeling that if he were to succeed in deciphering that meaning, then he would also have a better understanding of his life, which he did not understand nowadays. He had a feeling as if nowadays rifts were separating him from that formerly almost palpable constant that he at some time had been acquainted with as his personality. For Kingbitter the Hamlet question did not run “To be or not to be?” but “Am I or am I not?”
Kingbitter leafed almost distractedly through one of the typescripts that was sprawled on the table. It was a fairly bulky pile of paper, the manuscript of a play. On the cover sheet stood the title, liquidation, then the designation of its genre: Comedy in Three Acts. Below that: The setting is Budapest, in 1990. He grasped the sheet between finger and thumb so as to turn the page, but then gave way nonetheless to the dubious pleasure bestowed by the stage directions:
(A dingy editorial office in a dingy publishing house. Shabby walls, sagging book stacks, yawning gaps between the books stowed on the shelves, dust, neglect; although there are no signs that a move is under way, the desolate impermanence of a moving operation prevails all around. In the room are four desks, four work spaces. On each desk are a typewriter—a dust cover on one or two of them—piles of books, manuscript sheets, files. The windows overlook a courtyard. At the rear is a door leading to a corridor. Somewhere in the distance there is late-morning sunlight; in the dingy editorial office, dingy artificial lighting.
Kürti and his wife, Sarah, and Dr. Obláth are present in the room, ill at ease as they sit waiting around a desk that, as will become clear, belongs to Kingbitter.)
Kingbitter began to be seized by the passion to read on, the strange obsession that had so decisively shaped his life. He liked the play’s opening exchanges.
Kürti: Abominable. Execrable. I could throw up. This building. A palace once, you know. Those stairs. This room. All this.
Obláth (to Sarah): Tell me, do you know what he’s on about?
Sarah: He’s bored.
Obláth: I’m also bored. You’re also bored.
Sarah: But he’s radically bored; that’s the only radicalism he has now. That’s what has been left him from the glory days. Boredom. He takes it with him everywhere, like an angry shaggy terrier that he sets on others from time to time.
Kürti: We were ordered to be here for eleven . . .
Sarah (in a mollifying, almost pleading tone, as if speaking to a child): No one “ordered” us. Kingbitter asked us to bring the material into the office. By eleven, if possible.
Kürti: Eleven-thirty, and not a soul around. That doesn’t bother you two, of course. You just sit there and tolerate it, the same way everything in this country is tolerated. Every deception, every lie, every bullet in the brains. Just as you are already tolerating bullets in the brains that will be implemented only after the bullet is put in your brains.
Kingbitter laughed out loud. Or, to be more precise, he heard the distinctive curt snort that nowadays passed for a laugh with him. The sound welled up, so to say, from the belly and came out more as a dry grunt than a laugh; to be sure, there was not much in the way of mirth and happiness tinkling in it. He leafed on in the manuscript until his eye was again caught by a stage direction:
(Kingbitter hurries in, a thick file under his arm.)
Kingbitter: Do forgive me. It couldn’t be helped. Sorry, sorry. The conference ran way overtime.
Sarah: You look stressed. Did something happen?
Kingbitter: Nothing special; the publishing house is to be liquidated, that’s all. The state is not going to throw money at the losses any longer. It has financed them for forty years; from today onward it is not going to finance them.
Obláth: That’s logical. It’s another state now.
Kürti: The state is always the same. The only reason it financed literature up till now was in order to liquidate it. Giving state support to literature is the state’s sneaky way for the state liquidation of literature.
Obláth (in ironic acknowledgment): An axiomatic formulation.
Sarah: And what is to become of the publishing house? Will it cease to exist?
Kingbitter: In its present form. (He shrugs, a bit dejectedly.) But then, everything and everyone is ceasing to exist in its present form.
Yes, Kingbitter well recalled that morning nine years before. He recalled how, having come out of the editorial conference (the so-called editorial conference), a thick file under his arm, he had entered that room. Kürti, Sarah, and Obláth had been waiting for him there, by his desk. He himself had said near enough exactly what was in the play. The only snag was that by the time that scene was played out in reality, almost word for word, the person who had written the play, and that scene in it, was no longer alive.
He had committed suicide.
The police had found the syringe and the morphine ampoules as well.
Kingbitter had retained sufficient presence of mind to rescue the bulk of the manuscripts (a dazed Sarah had taken possession of the scanty correspondence) before the authorities arrived.
He had found this stage work too among the private papers. A good nine years ago, when Kingbitter had first read the play, the story was only just beginning, and it had soon carried on, with the character the play called Kingbitter—exactly like the real-life Kingbitter—retaining sufficient presence of mind at the scene of the suicide to rescue the bulk of the manuscripts before the authorities arrived. Then, having secured the literary haul and greedily set upon it, Kingbitter had come across the stage work and, shortly afterward, the scene in which it turns out that he had retained sufficient presence of mind,
et cetera. Thereafter, the scenes had succeeded one another, turn and turn about, in the drama as in reality, to the point that, in the end, Kingbitter did not know what to admire more: the author’s—his dead friend’s—crystal-clear foresight or his own, so to say, remorseful determination to identify with his prescribed role and stick to the story.
Nowadays, though, with the lapse of nine years, Kingbitter was interested in something else. His story had reached an end, but he himself was still here, posing a problem for which he more and more put off finding a solution. He would either have to carry on his story, which had proved impossible, or else start a new story, which had proved equally impossible. Kingbitter undoubtedly could see solutions to hand, both better ones and worse; indeed, if he reflected more deeply, solutions were all he could see, rather than lives. The character named Kürti in the play, for instance, had nowadays opted for the solution of falling ill. The last time Kingbitter paid a visit to him, he had found him in bed, surrounded by a sphygmomanometer, a little table on which were tablets of varied hues and shapes, packs of medicines, even a tiny gadget with which Kürti could self-inject; Sarah was sitting apathetically in the kitchen. This Kürti had once been a sociologist, retreating into some insignificant job during the seventies and eighties and meanwhile writing with unflagging zest his big monograph “on untimely consciousness and its cognitive roots in Hungary.” Prior to that he had even done time in prison, and though the secret police were no longer beating prisoners by then, they had still managed to land a blow so wretchedly that he had gone deaf in his left ear.
Kingbitter leafed back a few sheets in the play. We are back again at the opening scene, with Kürti, his wife, Sarah, and Dr. Obláth waiting for him, Kingbitter. Obláth says something, Kürti does not understand him, and Obláth repeats it at the top of his lungs.
Sarah: There’s no need to yell. Just don’t speak into his battered ear.
Obláth (awkwardly apologetic): I always forget!
Kürti (who has meanwhile set off on a walk around the room, inspects the bookshelves and furnishings, picks out
a book or two): Better you do. It was all over and done with long ago. (He rummages tentatively among the books, seeming to speak more or less in a trance.) And strangely enough, it all came to an end just recently. Quite suddenly. Just when it was in the home stretch. The régime was overthrown, and I’m not going to pretend it was me who overthrew it. A general liquidation is in full swing, and I’m not going to join in. I’ve become a spectator. And I’m not even spectating from the front rows in the stalls but from somewhere up in the gods. Maybe I’m worn out, but it could be that I never truly believed in what I believed. That would be the unseemlier alternative, because then they would have smashed my ear in for no reason at all. That is the assumption I’m inclining to these days. (He breaks off and ponders, book in hand.) I did time for no reason, dragged the millstone of a police record around for no reason, was on probation for years for no reason, and I’m no hero, I merely botched up my life.
Obláth (consolingly): Everyone here makes a botch of his life. That’s the local specialty, the genius loci. Anyone who doesn’t botch up his life here simply has no talent.
Kingbitter again heard the laugh that sounded more like an irate snort than a laugh. He regretted that he had missed that scene (he recalled that he had entered the room only later, with the thick file under his arm) and so had been unable to take part in the conversation. He liked the style, that wry gallows humor armed with the semblance of omniscience; a most serviceable style it was, the dialect of the initiated, protecting them from their disillusionments, their fears, their well-concealed childish hopes.
Kingbitter looked at his watch and established that he had nothing at all to do that day either. It was slowly getting on for noon. He fleetingly wondered how he had spent his day so far, but he would have been hard put to give an answer to that. True, he had been living a lively interior life today: he had dreamed something, he had awoken with an erection, and while shaving he had been dogged by a feeling that today he needed to decide, though he could not see clearly what it was he needed to decide, besides which he was all too aware of his own inability to make any decisions.
Despite that, the thought did cross Kingbitter’s mind that he ought to do something about finding a theater to do the play, the comedy (or tragedy?) “Liquidation.”
He was now in the ninth year of considering that.
Indeed, Kingbitter was now in the ninth year of considering whether he was handling the literary estate with due diligence.
There were all sorts of things in the legacy: prose pieces and notes, diary extracts and embryonic short stories (and the play Liquidation, of course). It was just that a crucial bit was missing—or at least so Kingbitter was convinced.
Apart from which—and this was Kingbitter’s most secret thought, so secret that he maybe kept it a secret even from himself—if he were to be rid of the play, he would, in some sense, also be getting rid of himself. He might also be rid of the oppressive sense of implausibility that stuck to him nowadays, haunting him like some disagreeable deficiency, at all times and in all places, like Peter Schlemihl and his missing shadow.
The story had begun on that morning when Kingbitter, thick file under his arm, had entered the publishing office where Kürti, his wife, Sarah, and Dr. Obláth were waiting for him.
In the file in question was the literary estate of Kingbitter’s dead friend—let’s call him B. for short (or Bee, as he liked to call himself). The way the estate had come into Kingbitter’s hands was that Kingbitter had retained sufficient presence of mind to rescue the bulk of the manuscripts before . . . but he has already had occasion to mention that.
Kingbitter had appeared at the editorial conference (the so-called editorial conference) that morning, file under his arm, with the firm intention of recommending that the publishing house, of which he was one of the literary editors, publish the legacy, and offering himself to undertake the editorial work relating to publication (forgoing any fees, naturally).
Except that the conference had been convened in order to announce the sad fact that the publishing house was operating at a loss, and for that reason they would be obliged to undertake certain administrative and financial maneuvers, from the stupefyingly tedious analysis of which all that Kingbitter grasped—but grasped with utter clarity—was that he would be ill advised to bring up the matter of his recommendation at this moment in time.
He again began to take an interest in what they had actually been talking about before he, having left the so-called conference, entered the room where his friends were awaiting him.
Obláth has just been discoursing on something in his habitual, passionately high-flown manner, his words followed by a prolonged hush. Sarah is sniffling, occasionally raising her handkerchief to dab her reddened eyes; Kürti drags his chair a bit farther away and wraps himself in a detached, profound silence.
Product details
- Publisher : Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (October 25, 2005)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 129 pages
- ISBN-10 : 140007505X
- ISBN-13 : 978-1400075058
- Item Weight : 4.9 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.19 x 0.36 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,626,974 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #13,589 in War Fiction (Books)
- #17,987 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #68,789 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
At least, that's how my reading has gone recently, with brilliant painful books by Herta Müller and Imre Kertesz at the top of the list. Both writers have won Nobels, deservedly. Kertesz's "Fateless" and Müller's "Herztier" (Land of Green Plums) surely rank with the finest modern novels in any language. Both are challenging creations artistically, emotionally, and intellectually.
"Liquidation" is a short tale, narrated by an 'editor' who is obsessed with recovering the lost novel of his friend "B", an Auschwitz survivor as a baby who commits suicide soon after the fall of Communism in Hungary. There are subtle threads between the 'fictional' personae of "Liquidation" and Kertesz's other works, particularly "Kaddish for an Unborn Child." In fact, the "B" of Liquidation is effectively the narrator of Kaddish, so in a sense the lost novel was found in Kertesz's own hands. In my previous review of Kaddish, I noted a similarity of style between Kertesz and the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, who should have won a Nobel also but didn't. Sure enough, Bernhard is acknowledged in Liquidation, on page 56. Then, on page 72, we discover that "B" had intentions of preparing a new translation into Hungarian of "The Radetzky March", the great novel by the Austrian Joseph Roth, which I've also reviewed. At this point, my reading of recent years seems to demonstrate quantum entanglement.
I don't want to reveal any more of the plot or structure of Liquidation; it's a book that reveals itself by stripping away its own complexities and ambiguities as you read it. Here are some snippets from it, which set my mind awhirl:
From B's suicide note: "Don't feel sorry for me. I had a perfect life. Of its kind. All one has to do is recognize, and that recognition was my life." Shades of Spinoza! Who would not have survived the Holocaust, had he lived in our times.
"This being without Self is the disaster, the true Evil, said "B", though, comically enough, without your being evil yourself, albeit capable of any evil act. ... beware of knowing thyself, else thou shalt be damned, he said."
From B's account of interrogation by the Communist police: "I was forced to an acknowledgement of the stark fact that man is, both physically and morally, an utterly vulnerable being -- not an easy thing to accept in a society whose ideals and practice are determined by a police view of the world from which there is no escape and where no explanation of any kind is satisfactory, not even if those alternatives are set before me by external duress rather than by myself, so that I actually have nothing to do with what I do or what is done to me." The 'alternatives' mentioned here are either to agree to become an informer or to be tortured. "Interrogation" is a nearly ubiquitous element in writings about the tyrannies of the last century, both communist and fascist. The interrogation scenes in Kertesz's and Müller's novels, set in Hungary and Romania, are matched in horror by those in Keun's and Roth's novels about Hitlerian Germany, and Bolaño's novellas about Chile under the capitalist murderocracy of Pinochet.
B's lover, Sarah, at the time of the fall of the Communist regime in Budapest, reports that she was "unable to stand aside from the high tide of general euphoria around her, the general climate of great hopes and great relief. She had gone to Heroes' Square, taking a candle and lighting it, standing with the crowd until night had drawn in, and she had sung along with the crowd in the lights of those tens of thousands of candles. None of that had been of any interest to B." In fact, B's suicide follows the 'restoration' of those Great Hopes. Likewise, in Müller's Herztier, the first of the circle of young dissidents to reach the West survives only six weeks before committing suicide.
Not a warm and fuzzy book, dear readers! Not a tale that resolves in optimism. Another story to make you wish you'd lived and died before 1900. But a book of disturbing insight and vivid emotion. Read it at your own peril, Pollyannas! All's for the worst in Kertesz's worst of all possible worlds.
The novella is about an Aushwitz survivor who took his life. We see most things through the eyes of our narrator, another concentration-camp survivor. The deceased was a writer and the narrator is a literary person as well. The narrator becomes obsessed with the notion that an author would not take his life without completing his opus first. Thus he examines the available writings he can find and pursues his search for the elusive novel. It is in this context that the truth reveals itself. Truth is hard to find if life seems to be a lie. That is, essentially, the focus of the message in "Liquidation". Since the message builds on itself much better than I can do it justice, I will not attempt to further define what our narrator discovers. However, I will say that my observation of Holocaust literature is that those that try to define what happened and give it meaning generally reach the same end. The Holocaust defies definition because we look to define in relation to our concepts of reality. What the literary Holocaust survivor shares with us, often, is a glimpse of a totally different reality but their ability to explain generally exceeds our ability to comprehend. In "Liquidation" Kertesz expands his message by giving us a debate about that reality through the perspectives of seperate Holocaust survivors. The debate enhances our efforts to understand but leaves us wondering if we have heard the conclusion or the introduction.
Liquidation is the fourth in a series of books by Imre Kertesz, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002. Three, "Fateless", "Kaddish for a Child not Born", and "Liquidation" have been published in English. The fourth, "Fiasco" awaits translation. Although each is related to the other, the recurring characters and their life's story tends to change, the common thread in all is that monstrous thing known as Auschwitz. Kertesz himself is an Auschwitz survivor, and all his books have put Auschwitz, something that defies explanations or answers, on center stage.
Liquidation contains a story within a story. The protagonist, the aptly named Kingbitter, is a book editor in Budapest. It is the turn of the new century, 2000, and company that employs him is in serious economic trouble. The book opens with Kingbitter and his small circle of `friends' discussing "B". "B", an author, committed suicide in 1990 by means of an overdose of morphine, the morphine provided by his ex-wife. The friends are discussing "B" last known work, a play entitled "Liquidation". Oddly enough, the play, which discusses Kingbitter and that circle of friends, has foretold their personal course of events in the ten years since his suicide. Additionally, references in the play to a book supposedly written by "B" have caused Kingbitter to spend ten years in search of the manuscript. The manuscript is never found and doubts arise as to whether it ever existed.
Although Kingbitter is the principal `living' person in the book, the story does focus on "B" and his life and death. "B" was one of those few children born at Auschwitz. The story of his birth and survival is one of life's small miracles, a small drop of water in a sea of evil and death. As the story progresses, and as the play within the play progresses, Kertesz exposes us to "B", his ex-wife, his mistress, and Kingbitter and company. Each has their own take on "B's" life and each provides the reader with some insight into "B"s life. As one friend notes, "B" once said that "Man, when reduced to nothing, or in other words a survivor, is not tragic but comic, because he has no fate." Taking the quote from Walpole, above, as a reference, it is clear that "B" is one given to thought and not to feeling. In fact, I had the distinct imperssioin that feeling was an emotion that "B" avoided, perhaps understandably, at all costs. Ultimately, as with his other books, neither Kertesz nor his characters can answer the question that is Auschwitz and the meaning of survival. For "B", his survival has rendered him fateless as the fact of his surviving deprived fate of an intended victim.
Kertesz' writing is sparse and to the point. He does not provide the reader with emotional content. He provides text and a description of his characters, their actions, and their thoughts. As was the case in Fateless, any emotions to be gained from reading Liquidation will come from your own sense of the text. Kertesz does not provide you with an emotional road map.
Although Liquidation is one of a series, each book stands on its own and may be enjoyed on its own merits. However, for anyone interested in reading Kertesz, I suggest they start with Fateless. Although Kaddish comes next chronologically, I suggest reading Liquidation next. The only reason for this order is the assertion by some devotees of Kertesz that the book "Kaddish for a Child not Born" may represent the manuscript not found by Kingbitter in Liquidation. That may or may not be the case but it may enhance the reader's enjoyment if it is viewed as the lost manuscript of "B". The reader should also be aware that although each book is related to the other and there is an overlap in characters at times, this is not a trilogy. Kertesz shifts the story line around quite a bit. The Auschwitz survivor in Fateless, for example, was taken to the camps as a teenager, unlike "B" who was born there. The stories are connected by theme, not by plot line.