Fatelessness, Imre Kertész’s first novel, fitted one of the coolest accounts we have of Auschwitz into a mere 262 pages. Detective Story, his third, distills it still further into 113, each of them mercilessly sharp and clear.
This time Kertész sets his story in an unnamed South American dictatorship; but there are several connections. Like Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, the Colonel’s regime lasts only a few years; one of his torturers carries a book about Auschwitz; and their two main victims are Jewish.
Like many of the Nazis’ victims, Federigo and Enrique Salinas are wealthy, educated and assimilated members of their society. The perpetrators — apart from the Colonel, who calls them, affectionately, his ‘filthy little piggies’ — are Diaz the chief, Rodriguez the sadist and Antonio Martens, the ‘new boy’ and our narrator. Into these few characters, as into his 113 pages, Kertész packs the whole range of victims and perpetrators.
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