The stipulation in Alfred Nobel’s will that his prize for literature should go to the producer of the “most outstanding work in an ideal direction” has often caused controversy. A case in point is the Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz, who was awarded the prize in 2002. “Outstanding” few would dispute, but “ideal direction”? Kertesz, who is a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, has mined his experience to produce work that focuses on the most degraded moments of human existence, finding in the camps, for example, not redemp-tion, but accommodation with evil.

In Detective Story, a novella first published in Hungary in 1977, Kertesz moves his attentions from Europe to South America, but man is still reliably vile. The narrative is the testimony of Anto-nio Martens, a secret policeman in an unnamed dictatorship. Martens gives his view of a case that seems to have eventually brought the government down, in which a prominent businessman and his son were executed on charges that were not so much trumped up as wholly imagined. The defence lawyer who introduces Martens’s account warns us of his “stony indifference” and “wholly cynical” attitude to his crimes. Martens often attempts to excuse his behaviour by reminding us, in a variation on a familiar theme, that he is “just a flatfoot”, doing “the profession I trained for”, but as the story proceeds to its grim, brutally predictable ending, his account is lit with shards of insight, usually suppressed, but still unmissable.

Of course, the flashes of conscience that Kertesz allows Martens are of little use to his victims. Part of the lesson of this distilled exercise in the logic of the police state is that the apparatus of dictatorship is roughly the same the world over. That is why Martens’s sadistic colleague Rod-riguez concludes that policemen are a breed apart, crossing international borders and political relationships. “Nowhere and at no time,” he says, “are the police hostile” – to other policemen, he means.

The case of Federigo and Enrique Salinas, wealthy father and son, unfolds with something of the pitiless absurdity of Kafka (a writer to whom Kertesz has, understandably, been compared before), as their strategy of survival in a police state becomes, inexorably, the thing that kills them. Martens has access to Enrique’s diary, so we are allowed to see the reckless nature that leads the young man into danger and makes his father act to protect him, only succeeding in sealing both their fates.

When Detective Story was first published, Pinochet was in charge in Chile and the military junta ruled Argentina. But Kertesz’s observations on the workings and psychology of “those in power”, especially when convinced of a great threat to their security, are not of purely historical interest. They warn us that human nature doesn’t change, only circumstances do.

David Horspool is an editor of the TLS.

Detective story by Imre Kertesz translated by Tim Wilkinson
Harvill Secker £12.99 pp112

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