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.