Imre Kertész's Detective Story in English

After an uprising against the totalitarian regime that he had worked for topples the former dictator, Martens writes his memoirs in prison, claiming that he now “understands the logic” of what he has done. Member of a “Corps” of three, Martens represents one possible response to totalitarianism – perhaps the most unsettling of all. The other two members were sadistic and nihilistic, respectively, whereas Martens was one who “merely did his duty”. In his memoirs, Martens relates the story of the two Salinases – a wealthy, respectable father and his idealistic, oversensitive son, who both fell victim to the Corps.

With Detective Story, and with The Pathseeker, to be published in a few months' time – both in Tim Wilkinson's careful and sensitive translation – Kertész's oeuvre in English is becoming more and more complete. A rereading of Fatelessness will now surely allow the reader to appreciate hitherto unnoticed qualities of that book and to evaluate it as much more than “another Holocaust novel”. As Kertész has repeatedly said, Fatelessness could not have been written without the experience of living in the totalitarian state of post-war Hungary. DetectiveStory, as all of Kertész's works, is born of the same experience.

Excerpts from the reviews:
”The tale is told by the villain, but Martens is a villain of a very modern sort, one who is not innocent but not depraved, not unaware of the monstrosities in which he is implicated but not the moving force. Ever since Hannah Arendt saw in Adolf Eichmann the 'banality of evil', novelists and thinkers have attempted to unpick the psychology of men of the Martens stamp, grey men who follow routine even if its demands savagery. Primo Levi wrote of them as being indispensable to the working of the concentration camp system, and wondered about the level of culpability that could be attributed to them.”
”Commissar logic”, by Joseph Farrell. The Times Literary Supplement, January 4, 2008

”A solid little tale that once again finds greater resonance, as these are times (2006) when an American president claims the right to detain suspected (for whatever reason – he refuses to give specifics) 'terrorists', with no oversight by any independent authority to ensure that the prisoners are not abused. Sadly, in 2006 Detektívtörténet no longer reads as a novel of what can happen in, say, Argentina or Hungary, but rather of what can and is being done by the governments of powers such as Russia and the United States.”
The Complete Review (link)

”The narrative is neat, lucid, written with admirable economy, all too believable. What chiefly interests Kertész and constitutes the true horror of the story is what Martens calls 'the logic' of their position, a logic which compels Diaz to 'put together in less than an hour and a half a watertight investigational file on conspiracy to engage in criminal acts endangering homeland security'. Once the tools of a criminal regime are deep in the blood, they find, like Macbeth, that 'returning were as tedious as to go o'er'. And such a regime will always find tools; that, too, is the 'logic' of the situation.”
The Scotsman (link)

”In his previous novel, Liquidation, Kertész imagined an Auschwitz survivor's suicide and its effect on those close to him. DetectiveStory is no less despairing a work. Martens expresses no belief in an afterlife, no suggestion that life has a purpose; the absence of any metaphysical conviction in his reflections leaves an impression of the darkest cynicism. (...) Translator Tim Wilkinson has rendered the sparse Hungarian into smooth English. It remains a bleak essay on the corrupting tendency of power.”
The Observer (link)

”The final twist would be tragic did the novella not feel something of an exercise in – what? Not pastiche exactly but something sharper. Liquidation, now in paperback, deals in 'so-called reality', as the protagonist Kingbitter resolutely calls it. With its epigraph from Beckett's Molloy, 'I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. It was not midnight,' and the novel's opening, in which Kingbitter leafs through the text of a play in which he and his friends speak dialogue they actually spoke nearly 10 years ago, Liquidation places us squarely in the realm of metafiction. There is a mystery at this book's heart, too.”

”Awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002, Kertész took the chance to explain his obsessive writing on the same subject. He said as a writer, he is interested in only one question: since 'nothing has happened since Auschwitz that could reverse or refute Auschwitz,' since Auschwitz 'suspended' literature, where can we go from here? In the absence of a more definitive answer, I would suggest probing deeper into his books. Tim Wilkinson's loving work on the poignant, multi-layered Liquidation and the slighter though acerbic Detective Story provides English readers with the opportunity.”

Source: Hungarian Literature Online