The unbearable darkness of being Eastern European: Kertesz

I'll admit that Imre Kertesz's novel (novella?) Liquidation gets a little better in the middle third, as he more or less focuses on telling his story and not on creating lots of little postmodern games and whimsies such as an interpolated play that's about the characters who are reading the play, and so forth. Now if he could only stop randomly switching from 1st person to 3rd person narration, which he does for no apparent reason and to no obvious positive effect, he might truly be onto something. The novel as it takes shape is essentially about an editorial underling, a reader for a publisher, Kingbitter (if I remember correctly), whose best friend, B. or Bee, commits suicide. Kingbitter takes on the task of assembling B's writings an d bringing them to the publishing house - he says that B is the only true literary figure whom he knows. He presents the writings (which include the self-referential play noted above, plus a story collection and a collection of essays and aphorisms) to a three-member publications committee - only to learn that the publishing house is going under and not taking on anything new. Two of the members are a married couple, and we learn that the woman had been having an affair for a long time with B. No matter - Kingbitter had been having a long affair with B's wife (estranged at time of death). The wife, Judit, a dr., had essentially provided the morphine that B. used to kill himself. The essence of the plot is that B.'s literary remains seem to be incomplete, and K. believes that B. must have left behind a great novel manuscript, or typescript (an editorial worker, he's particular about these distinction) - he asks Judit and others but all deny that the ms. exists. I'm not sure what his evidence is based on - but the pursuit of a a lost masterpiece is a fine literary trope - done very well in The Aspern Papers (less so in Possession) - and I must admit I've tried my hand at this topic myself. So that's the essence of the story, but that doesn't convey the mood, which is strictly dark Eastern European pessimism, even nihilsm - the post-traumatic endurance of the Holocaust (B a Jew born in Auschwitz) and then the Soviet era - and this novel, set in I think the 1990s?, seems dark and hopeless, larded with Beckettian philosophical drivel aout the meaninglessness of life. I've been thinking about the differences between Kertesz and Kundera - both writing about similar situations, intellectuals and artists cut off from creativity and communication, people getting by in dire poverty stripped of their professions - but Kundera full of humor and a spirit of life and Kertsz just shrouded in gloom. It's a short novel and we'll soon see how it ends - not well, I suspect.