Detective Story [Hardcover]

In a dispassionate retelling of his participation of the torture and death of a father and son, Federigo and Enrique Salinas, following a junta in an unnamed South American country in the 1970s, Antonio Martens relates his story while waiting for execution. Using the diary of one of the victims, Enrique, that Antonio has conscripted for his own use, Martens is chillingly objective. Federigo and Enrique Salinas first come to the attention of the secret police while they are monitoring civilians for information about a planned atrocity. Recognizing that some form of rebellion will simmer among the people, it is imperative to quell any suspicious activities for the good of the country.

Enrique is young and in love, chaffing at the recent political events and his beloved's acquiescence to their country's changed circumstances. He longs for the passion of resistance, for meaning in his life, although he is shunned by the true revolutionaries as bourgeoisie. To offer his son some protection from the inevitable dangers of his impulsiveness, Federigo draws Enrique into an innocent plan that inevitably results in both their deaths. Guilt or innocence is not at issue, as clearly the Salinas' are no threat to the government; but they become pawns, the focus and example of repression in the face of rebellion. Father and son fall helplessly into the jaws of a soulless bureaucracy with a point to make. Three principals are involved: Diaz, the boss who rejects whatever does not fit his ideology; Rodriquez, a flat-eyed man fascinated by the instruments of torture; and Martens, the most enigmatic of all, a patient observer who views the outrage from a distance, consuming Enrique's diary, from which he quotes long passages, as though it is his own narrative, witnessing the pleas of the father and the son and their unhappy fate.

While Enrique struggles against complacency in the face of repression and his father seeks a safe direction, it is men like Martens who destroy society from within, bearing no moral compass or sense of justice to define his life. Like the Germans who turned a blind eye to the extermination of the Jews, Marten is not invested in the actions of the secret police, an ordinary flatfoot doing his job, a true monster. With striking comparisons to today's issues, Detective Story, a small but potent volume, is haunting in its simplicity, a deeply unsettling recognition of a great moral quandary in an age of torture, patriotism wielded as a hammer and a goad. Luan Gaines/ 2008.

at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means."

from Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

"Detective Story", Hungarian Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz's novella is set in a prison in an unnamed South American country. An oppressive regime has just been overturned and the protagonist, former secret police detective Antonio Martens, is sitting in prison after a trial and conviction for the unlawful arrest, torture, and execution of Enrique Salinas and his father Federigo. The story plays out in the form of a prison memoir written by Martens that lays out the series of events that bought Martens and the Salinas family together in a deadly way. Martens' memoir also incorporates excerpts from a diary that had been kept by Enrique and `purchased' by Martens from the regime. Enrique's memoir serves as a counterpoint to Martens' memoir and the reader is able to get a pretty thorough look into the lives of Martens and Enrique. In concept and structure the book bears some resemblance to Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon". However, the book is more notable for its dissimilarity to Darkness at Noon than for its similarity.

In "Darkness at Noon" the prisoner Rubashov was a leader of the revolution and an active participant in the oppression and purges that eventually swept him up. In "Detective Story" Martens is no more than a bit player, a willing participant but not a leader. There is no irony in Martens' being called to account. There is nothing in his account that marks him as an intellectual, a leader, or anything other than a pawn. His participation is not that as a creator of an evil system but that of a cork that is swept along by the tide of repression. To that extent he comes closer to representing Hannah Arendt's vision of the banality of evil than that of Rubashov. As a result, Martens' memoir is noted more for what it does not say than what it actually says. Where Rubashov was insightful and painfully aware of the circumstances that brought him to his cell, Martens is content with a straightforward narrative of events. But although his narrative is almost devoid of emotion it is that very absence that makes the story so chilling. Kertesz does not hit your over the head with the horror of the story but, rather, hits you over the head with the absence of horror in the retelling.

Similarly, the diary excerpts of Enrique Salinas shows us another cork swept along by the tide, this time the tide of unrest and opposition to the regime. Enrique's diary is full of angst and emotion but it is the emotion of a naïve youth, one who struggles for love and desires nothing more than the acceptance from his fellow college students who oppose the regime. He rails against those that do not accept him because he is from a rich family. Yet, he too has no more control over his fate than Martens has (or at least so he claims in the memoir). As the story plays itself out we see certain inevitability, the coincidences of two pawns crossing each others path in a way that neither could predict. To that extent I think Kertesz may owe more to Kafka than Koestler.

Kertesz' work has won him the Nobel Prize for Literature. His earlier works (earlier in the sense of publication in English) Fatelessness, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, and Liquidation are thoughtful and compelling. I've read those books and I think my enjoyment of Detective Story was enhanced because I had read them. However, this novella stands on its own and I recommend it heartily to readers whether or not they have read any other Kertesz. L. Fleisig

Fate declared that Imre Kertesz's life, or at least his writing, would be entirely shaped by his teenage experiences as a Hungarian Jew in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Rather than `fate', perhaps one should refer to the "barbaric arbitrariness of history" (the phrase used by the Nobel Prize for Literature committee in 2002). His other works available in English, 'Fateless', 'Liquidation', and 'Kaddish for an Unborn Child' reflect his past more directly than `Detective Story'.

Nonetheless, `Detective Story' explores the ability of humans to utterly degrade themselves and others particularly in the service of modern bureaucratic societies. When the liberal democracy in an unidentified Latin American country is overthrown and replaced by a dictatorship, the secret police spy on suspected dissidents, then arrest, torture, and execute them.

Kertesz tells his story retrospectively through the voice of Antonio Martens, a regular cop turned secret police torturer, who now finds himself in his own cell awaiting punishment after the dictatorship has been turned out. Martens reconstructs the case of a prominent father and son Federigo and Enrique Salinas using his memory of the police interrogations and Enrique's own diary. The secret police, the Corps, pursues them and observing their suspicious behavior, arrests Enrique. Federigo then falls into their lap like overripe fruit. While their end seems foreordained, Kertesz throws in an unsettling twist that seems to demand a different outcome. The ultimate fate of the Salinas demonstrates the pointless barbarity and capriciousness of police operating outside the restraints of the rule of legitimate law.

Originally written in 1977 and only just published in English in 2008, Kertesz's short but profound work bears obvious relevance to the dangers unleashed when state authority escapes the bounds of legal and moral restraint. Highly recommended.