The Police State

 “Detective Story” by Imre Kertész, 1977

Kertész is the 2002 Noble Prize winning author of Fatelessness about the Hungarian Holocaust. It was partly semi-autobiographical, as he himself was sent to Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a 14 year old, then lied about his age to survive. This book is set in an unknown Latin American 'Homeland' after a police coup, perhaps Argentina. It is narrated by a cop in 'the Corps' named Antonio who worked to root out revolutionaries and stop an Uprising.   However, he himself has now been arrested by a new government for being a criminal. He sits in jail, reading the diary of Enrique, a young man he arrested, tortured and had shot. He remembers surveillance audio tapes of Enrique too.

Enrique writes in his diary of thoughts of suicide, his friend Ramon, a love affair, his bourgeois family. One long section is an argument he had with his father about 'acting' – translated as perhaps becoming an urban guerrilla. He eventually doesn't.

The regime cops Antonio worked with hated Jews, practiced torture and dragged innocent people into their web. As 'the new boy' he gradually did too. They believed in the police state as the ideal state. They worked for the Colonel, the Homeland and General Vargas. They worked outside the law.

They take Enrique and his father into custody after surveillance reveals some kind of surreptitious activity – which turns out to be benign but they don't believe it. And so the security machine proceeds.

Kertész' style is unadorned, simple, plain. He's a less dramatic Hemingway. At first you are not sure why he wrote this story. And after all, who likes torturers?  Is it a vague reflection on another authoritarian country? Is it trying to resonate like a Kafkaesque miasma? The standard line is that Kertész' writing reflects individuals caught in political and historic events much bigger than themselves. I'd say that is a little obtuse. He's no oblivious observer of 'objective' history, he takes a side.  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Argentina 1985,” “The Six Pointed Star,” “Revolutionary Rehearsals,” “The Long Revolution of the Global South” (Amin); “Democracy Incorporated” (Wolin); “Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety,” or the words 'fascism” or 'Kertesz.'

And I got it at May Day's excellent used/cut out section!

Red Frog

January 23, 2023