Detective Story by Imre Kertész

Category: 50 Books

25. Detective Story by Imre Kertész

This is what the book says it’s about: (i stole this from the goodreads site, but it’s also what’s on the jacket cover of the book so no spoilers here.)

As readers, we are accustomed to reading stories of war and injustice from the victims’ point of view, sympathizing with their plight. In Detective Story, the tables have been turned, leaving us in the mind of a monster, as Nobel Laureate Imre Kertész plunges us into a story of the worst kind, told by a man living outside morality.

Now in prison, Antonio Martens is a torturer for the secret police of a recently defunct dictatorship. He requests and is given writing materials in his cell, and what he has to recount is his involvement in the surveillance, torture, and assassination of Federigo and Enrique Salinas, a prominent father and son whose principled but passive opposition to the regime left them vulnerable to the secret police. Preying on young Enrique’s aimless life, the secret police began to position him as a subversive and then targeted his father. Once this plan was set into motion, any means were justified to reach the regime’s chosen end—the destruction of an entire liberal class.

Inside Martens’s mind, we inhabit the rationalizing world of evil and see firsthand the inherent danger of inertia during times of crisis. A slim, explosive novel of justice railroaded by malevolence, Detective Story is a warning cry for our time.

 

 

 

 

Okay, so Martens is telling the story, and you know he’s in prison so you know that whatever government he was working for is no longer in charge (or maybe it is and he was imprisoned as a scapegoat, i guess, could be another way to look at it; the book doesn’t say.) But the cover made it sound like Martens is this evil killer-torturer guy, and maybe he is? But he never talks about what he did. And I would expect a killer-torturer Evil Sicko to brag about what he’s done, or at least describe the torture and get pleaseure out of talking about it. But he doesn’t talk specifically about it the torture (unless I missed something?) and he’s never braggy about it or even sounds like he’s glad it happened.

See, Martens was a police man. and then wherever this is goes under dictatorship or martial law or something and he’s recruited to The Corps. And he’s with these two other guys and they have the Interrogation Unit. So it’s not like he was in this from the beginning. And so I don’t get the whole Martens = evil thing. Because he’s telling the story, maybe he’s lying? I don’t know, but I didn’t feel that he was evil. I felt more like, if he was a policeman and then kinda forced to join this Interrogation group that tortures people, that maybe he’s more coward than evil.

The cover made this sound like it was going to kill your mind with evil and torture and kind of in a “this could happen to you! beware!” kind of way. And if the book had actually been about that? It would’ve been pretty good. It just did not come across that way at all. It could be that it was ‘lost in translation’ somehow? But the guy who translated the book into English has won awards for his work as a translator, so i don’t know.

And I know that the author is supposed to be this awesome Nobel Prize winning author, and that’s awesome, but this book is just not that good. But I do feel bad slamming it for some reason.

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