Customer Reviews

Detective Story (Vintage International)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

I read Imre Kertesz' short novel "Detective Story" in two days, between a plane, a train, and a bus ride. And although one's standards for reading material may go down during the long, lonely hours of interstate travel, I'm sure that I would have been engrossed by the book even if I was on the beach or just spending a day at home.

The basic story arc of Detective Story is clear as day from the book blurb: a man explains his role in the tracking, arrest, and eventual tortures of two political prisoners in an unknown military-security dictatorship. Many of the small details reminded me of things I've read and heard about Argentina, such as the suspicion of people because of their hairstyles. How Kertesz learned about the internal workings of Latin American dictatorships from his base in Communist Hungary is beyond me.

The book's conceit as a jailhouse memoir is a bit hard to swallow. It serves its purpose, however, by allowing the reader to see the narrator compare his role in the regime with the one keeping him in jail. There are also extensive, pages-long exceprts from the victim's diary which allows Kertesz to show readers extensive scenes that the narrator otherwise would not have access too. These diary excerpts are themselves expertly crafted, concise little story worlds of their own. They may be the most gripping parts of the novel.

It goes without saying that the book has contemporary relevance. Unfortunately, it seemed that the translator tried to bring this parallel to the surface a little heavy-handedly by using the words "Homeland Security," which I doubt appears as such in the Hungarian, but who knows.

"Detective Story," by Nobel prize winner Imre Kertesz, is deceptively "a simple story," a short prison memoir coolly told by the condemned detective Antonio Rojas Martens. As one third of an elite corps of secret police, Martens relates how he routinely did his job and conducted an "investigation," which culminated in the deaths of two innocent people. The regime he worked for has since been overturned and now it is Martens' turn to die.

Martens provides us with the inside view of the agents of power, enforcers whose sole aim is to maintain order for those in control. Such authority goes beyond the law, beyond the rights of the individual, and beyond morality. As Kertesz, whose story in "Fatelessness" of his time as a young inmate at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, well understands, unchecked power, answerable to no one, will lead to the destruction of the individual and to barbarisms aimed at whole populations. So Kertesz places himself in the mind of what might very well have been that of a typical Nazi agent. Martens is sometimes confused, subject to headaches, and experiences fits of stammering, but he admires the cold logic of his boss Diaz and the regime he serves. He finally understands his mission: "We could no longer place our trust in anyone except ourselves. Oh, and in destiny...."

This story contains an unsettling message for our time, and chillingly reflects today's headlines. Although no country is mentioned in the novella, its setting could be Iran, China, North Korea, somewhere in South America, etc. I can't help but think that Kertesz had the United States in mind as well as he refers to the Homeland Department a number of times. And the facts presented in Chalmers Johnson's "Nemesis" about the worldwide influence of the U.S. military make that possibility all the more plausible.

I strongly recommend this gripping and very well-written work.

For this novel, there is no "setting"--as readers of novels are accustomed--because the entire story unravels, journal-like, from the point of view of one person, Antonio Rojas Martens. This former henchman now awaits trial for the crimes he committed in the service of an unnamed Latin or South American regime. It seems that the setting is Galtieri's Argentina or Pinochet's Chile since this novel was originally published in 1977, and only now available in English. Regarding the character's name Rojas Martens, it's important that he is a hybrid character of Dutch and Latino-Spanish ancestry because the crimes of which he is guilty make him like the European Nazi men who stood trial at Nuremburg. Detective Story is told in a kind of journal/diary form; Martens recounts the events in which he participated that led up to the imprisonment of the Salinas father and son who were later tortured and executed (the crimes for which Martens is on trial). The Salinas father and son were "guilty" of being rich, handsome, liberal, intelligent, and inquisitive.

Thankfully, Kertész doesn't go into detail on torture methods; a metaphor or analogy is sufficient to establish how immoral and gruesome were Martens and his owners. But what's the point of such a novel--what is there to detect--where the good guys and the bad guys are clearly distinguishable? The art of the author is to go inside the mind of Martens (and men like him) to find out how he willingly followed orders from the arch-criminal Diaz (men who are so bad that their consciousness is not an object upon which to exercise an aesthetic art, although filmmakers have tried it in Downfall.) Another of Martens's features--which Kertész amply illustrates--is his glibness, i.e., his lack of outrage which characterize his willingness to follow orders; these qualities now seem to be the key ingredient in oppressive régimes so common since the 1940s (and before).

I was strangely disappointed in this novel in that I was hoping for something more from Kertész; as I mentioned, all of these notions of following orders were addressed at the Nuremburg trials. If a novelist is going to go into details (which a trial cannot) then why not show the reader how it is that oppressive régimes keep popping up in various countries? Of course, I might be only quibbling, but some novelist should take it on--I feel sure someone has. I had to keep reminding myself that this novel first appeared in 1977. Also of note is that that Salinas's half-American girlfriend, Estella Jill, has no idea or doesn't care that the fascist dictatorship is on the rise in her adopted country. Consider the implications of complacent Americans . . . and read on.

We have governmental oppression in Imre Kertész's Detective Story. Imre Kertész is, of course, a Nobelist. He is also an emigre Hungarian author (having been based in Berlin for decades), which is why this book strikes me as a bit of a cop-out. To explain: he sets the novel in an unnamed Latin American police state where the internal security apparatus wields its power of arrest and terror with impunity. To my mind, he is excoriating the arbitrariness of dictatorial power, and his book would make as much sense in Mexico as in Hungary - so why did he not just base it on his homeland? For some reason, he preferred to report on the action at a remove, through the confession of Martens, a man who was once an enforcer (and police spy) for the previous regime. Now that that regime has been overthrown, and its apparatchiks are in prison, Martens awaits the kind of tortured death that he indirectly laid upon innocents in his youth. In any country, especially in one that is as insecure as Martens, there will always be scapegoats for perceived or imagined political threats. Surveillance and arbitrary arrest and torture is a logical concomitant. The torture can be physical as well as psychological; Martens explains how his organisation systematically destroyed an innocent father and a son. After all, even the most innocuous cannot be ignored, for the slightest threat is a danger to an absolutist regime, and every operative can hide behind the excuse of merely following orders. Detective Story is spare prose at its best, a small book concentrated in its chilling horror.

One thing is clear: Nobel Prize-winner Imre Kertesz cannot be accused of 'writing the same book over and over.' Two short novels less similar could not be found than "Detective Story" and "Kaddish for an Unborn Child", which I've recently reviewed. The latter is extremely 'literary', incomprehensibly profound or vice-versa, as non-plot-driven as Finnegan's Wake. "Detective Story" is written with the simple syntax of pulp crime fiction, without embellishment or allusion of any sort. It's presented as the 'testament' of Antonio Martens, written while Martens was on trial, placed in the hands of his lawyer, and published after his presumed conviction. The fictional Martens was a minor thug in the paramilitary 'death squad' -- the Corps -- set up by another Right Wing Colonel Dictator after a coup in an unnamed Latin American country, obviously either Chile or Argentina. Martens and his colleagues frame, torture, and murder a father and son. The son indeed has ambitions to resist the tyranny of the Colonel, though he doesn't in fact DO anything overt; the father, a wealthy man who supposes himself beyond the threat of the murderocracy, makes a huge blunder. The putative "logic' of the Corps is the imposition of Order -- Order for Order's sake, utter submission to Order -- but the reality is simple sadistic lust for power. It's a horrifying story, and a true representation, I think, of the psychosis of fascism, in the Third Reich or Phalangist Spain, under Stalin's phony Communism or Pinochet's brutal Capitalism.

The problem, however, is that it's been done so much better by others. Choosing a vague Latin American setting for his tale was a mistake on Kertesz's part. The narrative has no fiber of authenticity. It's abstract and sanitized. Bloodless. Odorless. Latin American writers have portrayed their own catastrophes so much more vividly and effectively. Kertesz's novella seems like high school magazine stuff in comparison to Osvaldo Soriano's "A Funny Dirty Little War" or Roberto Bolaño's "By Night in Chile" or "The Skating Rink". Then there's Julio Cortázar's "The Winners." If the most I can give Soriano by way of Stars is five, then Kertesz scarcely merits even two.

Kertesz deserves to be read, but start with a different choice.

Imre Kertesz wrote this slim 112 page novella. He is a Death Camp survivor and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002. The setting for this book is an unnamed Latin American country in the 1970s. A new military dictatorship is in power using the secret police to "deal with" revolutionaries with intimidation and fear.

The story is told by Antonio Rojas Martens, a low ranking member of the secret police who sits on death row awaiting his execution. He was implicated for the arrest, interrogation, torture and eventual assassination of the father and son of a wealthy family who is suspected to be plotting against the new government. This story is about how he arrived on death row.

The publisher's book cover led me to believe that we will be traveling in the mind of a monster - where will we see and live evil from the mind of the perp as opposed to the victim - that we should expect a horror story. Yet, there is very little explicit detail of the physical or emotional brutality of Martens or his superiors. Martens is guilty of being pulled along with the tide of the authoritarian regime but certainly is not portrayed as the savage monster I was lead to believe I would read about. Martens is casual, cold, hollow and detached in his telling of the story - blindly following orders to commit atrocities, which are not explicitly detailed.

This is a bleak gloomy story on the absolute power corrupting and its implications on humanity - paranoia, suffocation, hopelessness - all in a game of survival where it's impossible to "beat the house."

There were simply too many open ends in the slight book for me - too little detail of the perpetrators and the atrocities they committed - and too little information shared as to the extent of the key players role in the revolution.