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Last update - 18:37 11/06/2008 Fiction Tale for our time By Gerald Sorin Tags: Imre Kertesz, Hungarian  Nobel Prize-winning writer Imre Kertesz has written what is nominally a mystery novel, taking place in an unidentified totalitarian Latin American state. But, like all of his fiction, it is about the Holocaust, and also about the very nature of freedom Detective Story by Imre Kertesz (translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson), Alfred A. Knopf, 112 pages, $21 Don't let the title deceive you. The most prominent investigator here is no literary descendant of the tough, self-reliant, cleverly analytical sleuths found in the novels of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. Nor is there any clear "wrapping up" of the "Salinas Case" in Imre Kertesz's unnamed Latin American country (most likely inspired by Argentina in the late 1970s). Readers will learn that there is plenty of guilt to go around, but as with the best literary creations, most will be left struggling over how much, and to whom exactly it should be parceled out. Antonio Rojas Martens is a former "flatfoot" and the "new boy" in the "Corps," the secret police of Kertesz's imagined nation-state. We meet him, in prison himself, indeed on death row, almost immediately after an apparent "revolution" has unseated the despotic regime of "the Colonel," whose single-minded goal had been to build "a clean people," with "clean souls." Martens' recent experience in the Corps comes to us through a "memoir" he writes in his cell (a privilege he knows the former regime would never have granted). He earnestly tries to understand his role in what he calls "the logic and the destiny," a lethal combination of forces that moves officials to authorize or commit atrocities while going to great lengths to protect themselves from accountability. Martens seems to know, both before and after his actions in the Salinas affair, that in the Corps he is more or less blindly following illegitimate orders, including instructions to torture and murder university student Enrique Salinas and his wealthy, conservative father. But, "during," he says, "one forgets." It was only after joining the Corps, however, that Martens experienced occasional stuttering and constant night-time headaches, infirmities he connects only indirectly to his daytime activities. He writes that he was "of course" aware, "before" he was promoted, that "a different yardstick applied -- at the Corps, but [he] thought there was at least a yardstick." There are many voices in this novella, including those of the Salinases, mostly recorded in the son's diary. This piece of "evidence" is secretly possessed by Martens, who, in a surreal touch, begins to write his own version of events in its empty pages. Enrique's diary reveals a young man with a desire for "action," for change; he is bored "sick of doing nothing [and] of mediocrity," and he wants to "find himself." Whether or not this makes him an activist agent against the state, however, is purposefully left murky. There is also omniscient narration, and dialogue among Enrique, his friends, his lover, Jill, and among Martens' partners in monstrosity. Imre Kertesz, a Holocaust survivor as a teenager, is the author of many novellas, including his 1975 literary debut, "Fateless," an understated and chilling fictionalized account of his experience as an adolescent deported to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald and Zeitz. In later works -- "Kaddish For an Unborn Child" (1990) "Failure" (1988, not yet translated into English) and "Liquidation" (2003) -- Kertesz's fictional alter-egos try, now as adults, to "understand" their wartime experience. "When I am thinking about a novel," Kertesz once admitted, "I always think of Auschwitz." In 2002 when he, the first Hungarian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, accepted his award, Kertesz told the distinguished audience in Stockholm: "It is often said of me -- some intend it as a compliment, others as a complaint -- that I write about a single subject: the Holocaust. I have no quarrel with that. Why shouldn't I accept, with certain qualifications, the place assigned to me on the shelves of the libraries? Which writer today is not a writer of the Holocaust? One does not have to choose the Holocaust as one's subject to detect the broken voice that has dominated modern European art for decades." One esteemed reviewer of "Detective Story," blind, it seems to me, to the novella's essence, wrote that "it may come as a surprise that Kertesz's new [book] avoids mention of the Holocaust altogether." But this is simply not the case. Indeed, one small section of the book bears repeating here almost in its entirety: Martens asks Rodriguez, one of his colleagues, why he goes beyond the "job" of interrogation, why he so despises the suspects. "We ... crack down, roll up, interrogate -- fair enough," Martens says, "But why do you hate them?" At Rodriguez's answer, "Because they're Jews!," Martens all but chokes on his cigarette. He knows that the Salinas family is not Jewish and that there aren't more than a few hundred -- "maybe a thousand" -- Jews in the entire country. Rodriguez couldn't care less about numbers. Anyone who resists "order," he bellows, "who wants something else is Jewish. Otherwise why would he want something else?" Martens thinks his partner has been made "crazy" by an English book he's been reading. "The only word that I understood from the garish title," Martens writes, was "Auschwitz." Martens, however, did not understand much; he knew only that Auschwitz "isn't an English word," was only a place, an event he'd heard "something" about, "which had occurred long ago and far away." Perhaps even more important than this direct reference to the Holocaust is the gloomy, noirish mood of the story and the sense of implacable doom that pervades this fictional police state, the "destiny" and the "logic" that drives not only the perpetrators, but smothers the witnesses and bystanders. In his diary, Enrique has recorded part of a conversation he overhears at a cafe between two couples agreeing over drinks that "conditions were improving," that life was getting better as "the consolidation" was taking hold. "All it has taken," Enrique writes in frustration, "is a few months and already they have grown accustomed" to the spiritual and intellectual constraints of dictatorship. Kertesz writes what he knows in his bones. For complex reasons, many having to do with the language he spoke, Kertesz (like his compatriot George Konrad, and the late East German writer Stefan Heym) chose to remain in Hungary after the suppression of the 1956 revolt, and was able to observe first-hand, not as a boy now, but as a grown man, the functioning of a dictatorship. He saw how "an entire nation could be made to deny its ideals," and watched the cautious incremental moves toward accommodation with tyranny. Because the people of whatever country Kertesz is using as a model in "Detective Story" seem to surrender to a "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" moral style, he comes close to implying that the subjects "deserve" the corruption and savagery of the despots. But Kertesz is after something much larger than judgment. He wants, however much it flies in the face of post-modernism, to evoke a longing for liberty and an awareness of the responsibility we all, everywhere, bear for defending it. The subtext of "Detective Story" deals with Latin America, but there are frightening parallels to authoritarian states throughout the world, and at least oblique connections to the modern democratic United States. Strike against autocracy In contemporary America, it is still possible to maintain some independence in our federal judiciary, to sustain courageous groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way, to support a number of small-circulation, but occasionally influential, progressive magazines critical of the cheerleaders in the mainstream media, and to organize dozens of grass-roots movements dedicated to social justice and democracy. But, as in Kertesz's latest work, which manages to be compelling literature even as it serves as an explosive strike against autocracy, we have in the U.S.A.: a continuing, undefined and indefinable war against an amorphous hydra-headed enemy; brilliant legal minds tortuously defending a convoluted theory and practice of a "unitary executive," under which the head of state may violate domestic and international law with impunity; government spying on American citizens with the encouragement or at least tacit support of administrators and apparatchiks; and the incarceration of uncharged, even unnamed detainees. Kertesz's larger tale, then, does not point a finger southward (or westward); it points out universal questions about identity, aspiration, moral ambivalence, the politics of malaise, and the "logic" and "destiny" of the authoritarian state not only to make itself ever more powerful, but to bring along with it ordinary human beings to do or ignore its very dirty work. Martens finally admits that the Salinas case "would not permit anyone to remain clean who had played any part in it." But, he says, "Don't look at me for explanations. I know nothing about what makes the mind tick .... I'm just a flatfoot, that's the profession I trained for." Gerald Sorin, Distinguished Professor of Jewish and American Studies at the State University of New York, New Paltz, is the author of many books, including "Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent," which won the National Jewish Book Award in History. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Marketing ploy Israeli satellite TV has a new star - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Through her lens Madonna's next project: documentary about the Israeli-Arab conflict.

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