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Detective Story

The unwilling executioner

Imre Kertész
Harvill/Secker, 113pp, £12.99,

Carole Angier

Tuesday, 5th February 2008

Carole Angier reviews Imre Kertész’s new novel

Or rather, interestingly, not quite the whole range. Among the victims we meet only the innocent and apolitical — Enrique, who wants to join the resistance but hasn’t yet, and his father and his fiancée, who want to stop him. This too is a reflection of the Jews of Europe, who unlike the Basques, or Irish, or Muslims today, never formed an armed resistance. And in the clashes between Enrique, Federigo and Jill we hear the classic arguments over opposition to oppressive regimes by such innocent and (so far) unaffected citizens. People like us have no reason to resist, Federigo says; let’s just be happy, Jill pleads. ‘One can’t be happy in a place where everybody is unhappy,’ Enrique insists. But you have only one life, Federigo replies: if you don’t live it now, you will only lose it forever. Detective Story shows that this is true, but that it may not save you either.

Even more interestingly, Kertész’s main focus among the perpetrators is on the relatively innocent as well. Martens has joined the Corps for money and ambition; but he has been, as he puts it himself, insufficiently brain-washed. He abhors Rodriguez, and fears Diaz even more; he develops headaches and a stammer; and he ends a friend of the Salinases, accepting responsibility for his crimes, and facing his own death with dignity.

Is Kertész suggesting that many perpetrators are, like Martens, unwilling executioners? I think he is. And I think he is exploring the possibility that anyone could become such an executioner, even himself — step by apparently ordinary step, as the victims became victims in Fatelessness. (Primo Levi explored similar questions later, through a man he called Mertens, perhaps as a deliberate echo.)

Martens is Kertész’s alter-ego in Detective Story, trying to understand the logic that led to Auschwitz. His conclusion is that the moment power is exalted over law, we are unstoppably on the way. Levi would — indeed did — agree. But Detective Story is darker: for it shows that only those like Martens pay, while Diaz escapes, no doubt to start the cycle of limitless violence once more.

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