In this short novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author Imre Kertész, there is a moment in which the whole work comes together and peals with bone-chilling resonance: Antonio R. Martens, a "lowly cog" in the interrogation and torture corps of an unnamed totalitarian regime, in assessing his role in what has been dubbed the Salinas affair (a father and son, innocent of the charges brought against them, executed), ventures by way of explanation that "if the Homeland's security was under threat, we weren't accountable to anyone."
It matters not that this book was written by a Hungarian author in 1977 (one who was born in 1929 and imprisoned as a youth in Auschwitz and Buchenwald) and only recently translated into English; as a work of art it feels contemporary and recognizable, for its subject is the increasingly familiar and impenetrable logic of dictatorships. It is precisely the idea of totalitarian "logic" that Kertész wants to dissect in "Detective Story," a quick but far from simple read.
Now in jail and awaiting his sentencing at the hands of the new regime -- "the people's judges, as they like to call themselves," he says -- Martens has come, in the words of the lawyer who writes the preface to his confession, to "speak out and make sense of his fate." He is not interested in exoneration, nor is he interested in being forgiven -- he feels he has "grasped the logic" of transpired events, and wishes to tell his "simple and sickening story."
And a sickening story it is.
As the newest member of a small, elite branch of the secret police, it's Martens' job to document the information gathered from various interrogations. "It's nasty work," he says, "we take away the offender's mind, shred his nerves, paralyze his brain, rifle through every pocket and even his innards." Complicating this, of course, is that they only have the vaguest idea of what they are looking for: "We had picked up intelligence about an impending atrocity. We had to prevent that ... with every available means: our Homeland and the colonel demanded it of us."
Their relentless search through the citizenry leads them to Enrique Salinas, a student at the recently shut down university, who is eager to live life as if he "were really existing." Enrique's life as the son of a bourgeois business owner has been pretty smooth sailing amid the political upheaval in his country (he's even found true love). But he's becoming restless, claiming that to be happy in the face of injustice is "simply vile ... one can't be happy in a place where everybody is unhappy."
His father, Federigo, who has weathered these changes before, disagrees, asserting that regimes "come and go; the worse they are, the quicker ... one only has to get through it." And the way to get through it is to remain completely uninvolved, staying as far away as possible from the two poles, "that of the persecutors and that of the persecuted."
What both father and son fail to realize, however, is that against a regime that values power over any sort of law -- where power, in fact, is the law -- those not in power stand no chance when they fall out of favor, be they innocent or not.
