Another Country Heard From--Nobel Winners Redux

Browsing at two different libraries, I found a couple of books by Imre Kertész, his first Fatelessness and the book excerpted below.

from Liquidation
Imre Kertész

(Kingbitter hurry 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 oward 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. Given 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. . . . 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.

Interesting enough hook.  Let's see how it actually plays out.