Detective Story
Imre Kertész, Harvill Secker, 120pp, £12.99
Antonio Martens, formerly a torturer in a now-defunct dictatorship, awaits sentencing for his crimes. Trapped in his cell, he begins writing the story of Enrique and Federigo Salinas, a father and son tracked, tortured and finally executed by the state. In this taut and disturbing novella, Kertész explores the failures of storytelling as a means of redemption.
Detective Story carries a loose structure that ultimately requires something tighter. The political environment surrounding Martens fails to dominate the novel convincingly in the way one might expect. In defining this nameless regime as essentially indescribable, Kertész relies on a brooding atmosphere to express the inherent horror in its entirety.
Martens is an untrustworthy but beguiling narrator, blind to his own moral decline. Kertész is careful not to sentimentalise, making Detective Story very much a two-way piece: the reader is compelled to work with the author in order to gain any kind of fulfilment from the writing. Even then, the sense that something important is missing cannot quite be avoided, despite the novella’s genuinely haunting and lyrical character. It is this delicately evoked moodiness that renders the book a memorable and thought-provoking work, even if it is, in the end, a fundamentally unsatisfying one.
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