Thus, Kertész blends the Orwellian world with a Kafkaesque one. Whether Enrique or his father are guilty of treason or trying to overthrow the government is wholly irrelevant. They, like almost anyone else in the country, are powerless to change their destiny. Having been identified as a potential threat to "Homeland security" due only to association, Enrique and his father are inexorably entangled in the jaws of the leviathan. Detective Story is like many detective novels; the story isn't in the end result, it's how the characters get to that end.
Kertész, an Auschwitz survivor, won the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Hungarian author to do so. Originally published in Hungary in 1977, Detective Story's appearance in the U.S. this year sadly reinforces its relevance.
At just more than 100 pages, this is more a novella than a novel. It is written in sparse, straightforward prose, something retained in Tim Wilkinson's translation (Detective Story was on the longlist for the first annual Best Translated Book Award). Characters are portrayed psychologically; Martens seeks to expiate his conscience, noting that although the Corps "brainwashed" him it wasn't enough. He still invokes some bit of excuse, saying that as the "new boy" on his interrogation team, "I was aware that a different yardstick applied here at the Corps, but I thought there was at least a yardstick."
Enrique's conscience is similarly plagued by guilt, but guilt over the benefits his family's status affords him and the perceived complacency of the citizenry, himself included. He expresses an existential viewpoint of the meaninglessness of life under the current regime and he yearns to do something, anything, to bring value to his life. His father's conscience, meanwhile, will suffer the repercussions of his own deceptions.
Thus, the power of Detective Story is not in its character description but showing how easily it is for evil to be viewed as a temporary necessity until it simply becomes accepted. As the defense attorney says in introducing the story, "Let me add, not in his defense but merely for the sake of the truth, that this horror story was written not by Martens alone but by reality, too."
Article comments