Detective Story, by Imre Kertész
mark beyer
Post-modern Kafkaesque stories don’t often work for me. Too much information is given; we see too much and know too much to appreciate the irony. Or the horror. Knowing this, it came as refreshing enthusiasm to find a book that so captures the failure of both man and state, yet not written by Kafka himself. Alas, he died in 1924, much too soon to be a post-modernist, but at the right time to encourage future existentialist authors.
Five years later, in 1929, Imre Kertész was born in Budapest, Hungary. At age 14, he was taken by the Nazis as a Hungarian Jew, deported to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, and survived. Survival alone in a Nazi death camp does not make one an existentialist, or move one toward reading Kafka. You have at least to be a writer to see how one might put such treachery into perspective. Primo Levi comes to mind, so too does Arnost Lustig. Kertész wrote his first novel, Fatelessness, in 1975. Naturally, it wasn’t received well in Yugoslavia; communists don’t deal well with irony, or existentialism.
Kertész, Hungary’s Nobel Prize winning writer (2002), wrote Detective Story in 1977. It has now just been translated into English (by Tim Wilkinson). Somehow there’s irony in that, but for now I won’t speculate. What pops out when you read this novel is the spartan language used, the cold language of its interlocutor narrator, Martens. He is a detective, so the language used is sufficient, and not perfect. We don’t want perfect. We get facts, we get basic description, we get details.
Martens sits in jail, awaiting, he presumes, execution. He has written a narrative, given to an un-named figure, like some Greek chorus, and so we have the manuscript. Marten tells the story of himself, but also that of Enrique Salinas, son of a wealthy and powerful businessman in the unnamed city in the unnamed country in which the story takes place. The country is not Hungary, but South, or perhaps Central, America. A military coup has taken place in the country, so there is unrest with the people, upheaval in the government ministries and social organs. This includes the colleges, which have closed, leaving Enrique with nothing to do but contemplate. He hates the ruling junta, hates the industrialists for not objecting to the takeover, hates the people for turning a blind eye (or their duplicity).
Enrique wants to act, but he doesn’t know how. He visits bars, nightclubs, the beach, hoping he can meet people who are planning to act. And this is how Martens, our jailed detective, comes to know Enrique—through surveillance photos. Later, Martens gets hold of Enrique’s journal, which holds a treasure trove of chronicled intrigue, suspicious meetings, thoughts against the state. This is damning evidence in a world turned upside down. Enrique is brought in for interrogation, and so Martens and the boys’ fates soon intertwine. They stand together under the dark specter of the powerful.
Early in his tale, Martens is suspicious of his role as a new man in “the corps”—a special police unit set up to hunt dissidents—and his superior notices something:
“Sure, sure,” says I. “It’s just … how should I put it … I mean, I actually thought we were serving the law here.”
“Those in power, sonny boy,” Diaz corrects me. My head started to ache. Oddly, it was actually Diaz who made it ache, not Rodriguez.
To that I say, “Up till now I thought the two were the same.”
“Fair enough,” Diaz concedes. “Only you shouldn’t lose sight of the order.”
“What order is that?”
“Those in power first, then the law,” Diaz says quietly with that inimitable smile of his.
Martens’ story is a life established in law and order, suddenly upended by the confusion of power. This is the kind of power that oversees all things. It’s not Big Brother, it’s death squad realpolitik. These people don’t fool around with niceties of laws and rights. When he is transfered from the civilian police to the secret police, he says of his indoctrination, “I completed the course; they brainwashed me. Not enough, though, not by a long chalk.” Martens is troubled. He gets headaches. He doesn’t understand all this. And when you don’t understand all the rules of the game, you don’t see the play coming at you that will end your career.
Enrique Salinas’ story is more complicated. Enrique family connections can do just so much for a strong-headed young man. But he doesn’t understand yet the value of life under junta control. In his diary, Enrique describes the confrontation he has with is father, after his parents realize he might be involved with some sinister people, people who could get Enrique arrested, sent to jail, or even executed just by association with them:
“You think I’m middle class, a bourgeois. A property owner and stocck market speculator. Right?”
I don’t know if I did think that; I don’t know if I could think that. When it comes down to it, that is what I am as well. I am privileged because he’s my father. All the same, I said: “Yes. And I can’t come to terms with your patience.”
“Why?” he asked.
I thought I was going to fall off the chair. He was so inexorable as an examining magistrate. Was I to start all over from the beginning?
“Because,” I exclaimed, “I no longer have patience for even half an hour!” I jumped to my feet. “Don’t you understand that I can’t bear to go on living like this? I’m sick of doing nothing, of my situation, of mediocrity!” A good word that; I was pleased with it. “Yes, that’s it: sick of mediocrity,” I repeated. “Mediocrity is a sickness. Yes, Dad,” I added. “Mediocrity is downright pathological!”
A detective story by nature meets facts slowly, but when they come — sometimes microscopically sometimes atom bomb-like — you need to pay attention. Detective Story is one such novel. Ketész has a way of leaving out things—facts, images, dialog—to unnerve the reader. We hear talk of torture—the word is never used—but never see the act. And when the story behind Enrique’s interrogation finally comes out, you understand that sometimes the more you explain, the less you are believed.
We have in our lexicon Kafkaesque because of the very disconcerting sort of tales, and writing style, Franz Kafka created. While imitation is a form of flattery, poorly executed imitation is an insult to the original. Detective Story is not imitation, but clarity of the means by which government and people conspire to make life a bloody mess. Kertész new this life because he had witnessed it. He said in his Nobel Prize speech: “When I am thinking about a new novel, I always think of Auschwitz.” Writing stories from the perspective of experience, Ketész is able to show the reader what it feels like to be him, to live as the hunted, the oppressed, the persecuted, from various angles. So why didn’t he place this story in Nazi Germany, or post-war communist Hungary? Would that have better shown us the world of totalitarianism? Perhaps. Through the prism of history, the answer becomes more clear: there are many places in the world were darkness has fallen than what can be found in the easy history we read in textbooks. Darkness is humanity’s universal theme.
Detective Story, by Imre Kertész
Alfred Knopf
112 pages; $21
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