I can't go on: Vast generalizations about European fiction

First rule: Beware of short European novels w/ epigraphs from Beckett (not Josh), particularly from Beckett's fiction. I'm reading a short Hungarian novel by a "Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature" - a blessing or a curse? has any Nobelist ever written a great book after winning the prize? - but for some reason the Nobelistas chose Imre Kertesz over such less lights as, oh, John Updike, Philip Roth, even Bob Dylan. So, Liquidation, by Kertesz, is all that's right and all that's wrong with European fiction. They all kind of blend together for me, but I've read or at least started so many novels like this that repeatedly pose the question: what is real and what is imitation? what is fact and what is fiction? when is the narrator reliable and when not? Negation, for example, is about a character with an arbitrary name that may or may not really be his name, and the essence of the plot, as I see it so far, is that this character is a reader at a publishing house who has brought to 3 of his colleagues there a manuscript for consideration and the manuscript is about the four of them debating whether to publish this manuscript, and on it goes. Along the way we get many observations on the order of the the only true meaning of life is suicide. I can't go on I must go on. However: behind all this claptrap is a potentially good story: the life of a writer, born in Auschwitz, living through the Soviet domination of Hungary, imprisoned for his writing, at last completes a manuscript and then dies, perhaps suicide, leaving the ms. to his best friend to shepherd into publication and the friend learns the manuscript is about him. This could be appealing and mysterious - if he would just tell the story! Why can't he? It's as if the entire generation of European novelists are trauma survivors, outliving Nazism and Communism (the novel is set during a time when Hungary is still impoverished - not over-run by American students on break or Brits on gap year). I feel for them, they have endured much more than I have, than we (white) Americans have - but as a reader I feel - let in some fresh air. Tell the story in a straightforward manner, chronicle your experience, record it for ever - don't hide and disguise and feint behind pseudo-philosophy and postmodern gewgaws.