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After reading three novels by Imre Kert?sz, I finally come upon one that I thoroughly enjoyed. And it?s ironic that it has nothing to do with his obsessive subject: Auschwitz.

Detective Story contains the confession of Antonio Martens, a young detective from an unnamed Latin American country, currently in jail for murder after the coup that overthrew the regime he defended. Martens worked for the Corps, a special unit which spied on subversives and cracked down on anyone who could pose a threat to the stability of the regime. In other words, Martens was a torturer and murderer of innocent people.

His confession focuses especially on the Salinas case, in which Federigo and Enrique, middle-class father and son, were murdered after suspicion that they were involved with subversive groups.

Although this novel doesn?t deal with Kert?sz? usual autobiographical reflections, it certainly benefits from his personal knowledge of human cruelty, the facelessness of totalitarianism and how it must feel to grow up in a dictatorship.

Antonio Martens is a remorseless nasty piece of work, whose impersonal rendering of the events makes him sound like a robot reciting a formula or a Nazi soldier naively arguing he was just following orders, doing what everyone else was doing.

So from a stylistic point of view, this novella is hardly breathtaking. It?s short, adjectiveless sentences for the most part; but whereas in some writers this style is overstated, here it?s natural because it reflects the type of person Martens is. And because of their directness, they carry an extra punch. Just consider Martens? first paragraph:

"I wish to tell a story. A simple story. You may ultimately call it a sickening one, but that does not change its simpleness. I wish therefore to tell a simple and sickening story."

In one short paragraph Kert?sz has set the tone of the story.

Some dialogues are pregnant with black humor and irony. For instance:

?The world would look very different if we policemen were to stick together.?
?But we do stick together, don?t we??
?Not just here, at home, but throughout the world!?
?In every state, you mean??
?I do.?
?You mean the police of hostile states as well??
?Nowhere and at no time are the police hostile.?

For Martens, the moment anyone?s life becomes a file at the Corps, it becomes inevitable that they?ll get in trouble with the law, even if they?re innocent. As he nicely explains:

At the time we had done nothing more than open a file on Enrique. We already knew about him. He featured in the records as an abstract piece of data, and we knew that sooner or later he would have to play a part in person.

You don?t get a file because you?re guilty. You become guilty because they create a file on you. This logic is downright terrifying. A few lines later:

In short, our records had already identified that Enrique was going to perpetrate something sooner or later. As far as we were concerned, his fate was sealed, even if he himself had not yet made up his mind.

It?s an understatement to say I loved this novel. I haven?t read such an original condemnation of totalitarianism, or such a clear explanation of its inner workings, in a long time. This is George Orwell?s 1984 if he had written it from O?Brien?s perspective. I read it in two days, always enthralled, and recommend it to everyone.