Imre Kertész
Detective Story.
Knopf, 128 pages, $21

Auschwitz, for the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész, was no aberration, but a logical culmination of European thought and culture. In his 2002 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, forty-five years after his liberation from Auschwitz, Kertész said, “What I discovered in Auschwitz is the human condition, the end point of a great adventure, where the European traveler arrived after his two-thousand-year-old moral and cultural history.” For Kertész, to call the Holocaust inexplicable is to indulge in moral and intellectual faint-heartedness, for its logic, set in place one decision at a time, although immoral, is indisputable. In his experience, it is altruism and self-sacrifice that are, strictly speaking, illogical as they put one’s survival at risk. Evil, on the other hand, has shown itself supremely logical throughout the twentieth century.

This precept lies at the heart of the four of Kertész’s books that have been translated into English. His 1975 novel, Fatelessness, based closely on Kertész’s own experiences in the camps, is narrated by an assimilated Jew, Georg Koves, deported, as Kertész was, from Budapest in 1944 at the age of fourteen. He narrowly avoided the gas chambers by claiming he was sixteen and therefore fit for work. The novel struck a raw nerve when it was published, not only because of the dispassionate acceptance with which Georg relates the horrors he has survived, but, because of his refusal, on his return to Budapest, to adopt the expected role of victim. Although the experiences he relates are harrowing, he will not admit that he noticed any “atrocities.” There is no need to explain how it all happened, he tells a journalist pressing him for an account of the hell of the camps. It was a gradual but inexorable process, a matter of taking steps. It began

in a not exactly opulent but still, on the whole, agreeable, neat, and clean station where everything becomes clear only gradually, sequentially over time, step-by-step. By the time one has passed a given step, put it behind one, the next one is already there. By the time one knows everything, one has already understood it all. And while one is coming to understand everything, a person does not remain idle: he is already attending to his new business, living, acting, moving, carrying out each new demand at each new stage.

He points out that his neighbors, too, had managed to survive and keep hold of their flat in Budapest, by taking “steps.” It is not a matter of blame, he assures them, but the need “to admit it, meekly, simply, merely as a matter of reason, a matter of honor.” The Holocaust did not “come about” as they would have it. Everyone, even the deported, took steps.

The protagonists in his later books, Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990) and Liquidation (2003), are variations on Georg: Holocaust survivors adapting themselves more or less successfully not just to life after the camps, but to a new variety of totalitarianism. The spare, feline prose of Fatelessness is replaced by a darker, cynical tone, bleakly humorous, and, especially in Kaddish, echoing the obsessive monologues of Thomas Bernhard:

I have always sturdily, one might say radically, guarded the chattel I regard as most important (myself), on the one hand against any form of effective self-destruction that is not a decision of my own free will, and on the other hand, I have always guarded it, and continue to guard it, indeed increasingly so, against the cheap and perverted seductions of any sort of communal idea (which, by the way, I could just as well list among the varieties of effective self-destruction).

The self-destruction in Liquidation is that most effective variety, suicide. The liquidation in question, however, is not, or not only, the most obvious one of the Final Solution, but that of a state-sponsored publishing house, no longer viable in a society that had finally abandoned the communal ideals of socialism. The publishing house had previously rejected the manuscript of the writer, B., who has committed suicide. B.’s novel appears to be much like Fatelessness, just as B.’s biography resembles Kertész’s. B. believes Evil is the governing life principle, yet in his novel he allows for the occurrence of Good, a reverse image of Gide’s acte gratuit.

With their echoes, internal references, and shared fictional and moral frameworks, these three novels are closely intertwined. Kertész’s most recently translated book, Detective Story: A Novel, fits into the same genus, but is of a slightly different species. Originally published two years after Fatelessness, Detective Story paints the inner life of one of terror’s functionaries. Whether for the benefit of the Party censors or as an illustration of the universality of his theme, Kertész set the novel in an unspecified Latin American country just after a military junta has been overthrown. It could have been modeled on any number of real-life models—in 1977, Pinochet had been in power for several years and Argentina’s Dirty War had recently been launched.

This is not a story with a detective in it, but is the detective’s own story. The body of the novel is the written confession of one Antonio Martens, on trial for his “complicity” in multiple state-sanctioned murders. Martens was a simple police detective recruited into the elite security branch known as the Corps, in charge of cracking down on insurgents and any “shaggy-haired wierdos” who opposed “the Colonel”’s regime. What this requires, in the words of his boss, Diaz, is “to bring logic to bear on Creation.” It is the logic of power, of course, not of the law.

Despite his training for the Corps, Martens still expected to find them operating by a “moral yardstick.” There is no yardstick. The rule is that of men like his sadistic colleague Rodriguez, anxious for any opportunity to try out a torture apparatus of his own design. Martens’s debilitating headaches begin, along with his constant refrain, “I was just a new boy then.”

Martens becomes obsessed with the Salinas case, in which a father and son, Federigo and Enrique, previously protected from the Corps’s reach by their wealth and connections, are drawn into the system’s maw through a mixture of good intentions and naiveté. Martens knows they are innocent, but it is his job to present a “watertight” case against them. And he does. Just as disturbing as his willingness to frame these innocent civilians for the benefit of the system’s internal consistency is the prurience and envy that saturate his account of spying on them. He even buys Enrique’s diary from the Corps archivist, and rereads it compulsively.

Detective Story is a short book, more fable than novel. But in just over a hundred pages, Kertész creates a mesmerizing psychological constellation of the persecutors and their quarry. His physical descriptions are minimal, but his presentation of the mechanisms and reflexes that trap his characters in deceit, murder, and corruption are so nuanced and complex it is difficult to dismiss Martens either as a monster or a pawn. He is simply another one of those who make such tyrannies run, one more or less conscious step at a time. The human nature Kertész found in Auschwitz is here unchanged. But, as he illustrates in this spare novel, its ingenuity is inexhaustible, its expression legion, and its logic unassailable.