Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic Kertész, I. 2008 | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Nobel Laureate Kertesz plunges readers into a story told from a killers perspective as Antonio Martens recounts his involvement in the surveillance, torture, and assassination of a father and son who are opposed to the current regime."
Author Notes
Imre Kertész was born in Budapest, Hungary on November 9, 1929. He was only 14 years old when he was deported with 7,000 other Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in 1944. He survived that camp and later was transferred to the Buchenwald camp from where he was liberated in 1945. After returning to his native Budapest, he worked as a journalist and translator. He translated the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Elias Canetti into Hungarian.
He wrote several novels that drew largely from his experience as a teenage prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. His novels included Fateless, Fiasco, Kaddish for a Child Not Born, Someone Else, The K File, Europe's Depressing Heritage, and Liquidation. He also wrote the screenplay for the film version of Fateless in 2005. While his work was ignored by both the communist authorities and the public in Hungary where awareness of the Holocaust remained negligible, his work was recognized in other parts of the world. He received awards including the Brandenburg Literature Prize in 1995, The Book Prize for European Understanding, the Darmstadt Academy Prize in 1997, the World Literature Prize in 2000, and the Nobel Prize for Literature for fiction in 2002. He died after a long illness on March 31, 2016 at the age of 86.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
At the start of this subtle look at the price of the war on terror from Hungarian author Kertesz (Liquidation), Antonio Martens, a policeman in an unnamed Latin American country, awaits trial for multiple counts of murder after the regime that employed him was toppled. Martens tells how he was transferred from the criminal investigative branch of the police to the Corps, a security unit, where, unfettered by any meaningful restraints, he pursued the case of Federigo and Enrique Salinas, a father and son who operated the country's leading department store chain and were suspected of plotting treason. Kertesz, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature, charts Martens's incremental descent into barbarism to chilling effect. This relevant and timely political allegory will remind many of J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
It's literally a "detective's story" that unfolds in this grim novella, published in 1977 and previously untranslated, from the Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian author. Set in an unnamed Latin American country and prefaced by the remarks of a court-appointed attorney, the book quickly settles into policeman Antonio Martens's "confession" as he awaits trial for his complicity in torture and murder practiced by "the Corps" (secret police), which served the ill will of dethroned dictator "the Colonel." Martens chronicles his ascension from "honest flatfoot" to ingenuous "new boy" assigned to monitor the activities of prosperous liberal department-store owner Federigo Salinas and his adult son Enrique, a university student who yearns to join his country's radical liberal underground. Martens dutifully records his surveillance of both men--on the pretext that "our records had already identified that Enrique was going to perpetrate something sooner or later." Undaunted by severe headaches and persistent misgivings, Martens intensifies his scrutiny, going so far as to acquire Enrique's diary, and extend the Corps' threats to Federigo's terrified wife Maria and Enrique's unconcerned girlfriend Estella (aka "Jill"). The expected occurs, and Kertsz (Liquidation, 2004, etc.) manages a few chilling moments as father and son, exhausted and unhinged by relentless "interrogation," meet the fate long since planned for them. Alas, such moments are few. Almost from the first page we feel Kertsz straining to stretch this simple, predictable story to novella length. The device of the diary permits Martens to depict scenes and conversations to which he was not privy, and virtually none of these is even marginally credible. And in such "big" moments as a heartfelt climactic father-son conversation, the story collapses into redundancy and dullness. Perhaps Kertsz's other works justify the Nobel. Not this one: Orwell, Koestler, Solzhenitsyn and many others did it better. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Nobel laureate and Auschwitz survivor Kertész delivers a cautionary tale that straddles the jagged line between satire and tragedy. He presents a torturer's account of how the machinery of a South American police state is brought to bear against a young man who wants to rebel against his wealthy upbringing and fight for freedom even as the resistance rejects him and his father maneuvers to save him. Unfortunately, the perverse logic of his defense proves no antidote to a dictatorship with pent-up madness to unleash. The interrogation team includes a politically astute functionary, a true sadist and a new boy the narrator who naively asserts, I actually thought we were serving the law here only to hear in reply, Those in power, sonny boy. It's an important message, delivered with style and biting wit, but will most U.S. readers be too jaded or uninformed to understand its contemporary implications and take it to heart? One other question nags: Might this narrative work better as a play?---Sennett, Frank Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IMRE KERTESZ, who in 2002 was the first Hungarian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, once said, "When I am thinking about a novel, I always think of Auschwitz." One is also always thinking about Auschwitz when reading his novels, as the bestknown of them form a loose tetralogy that give a fictionalized account of Kertesz's own experience of the war. His unnerving 1975 debut, "Fatelessness," recounts the story of a child deported to Auschwitz and later Buchenwald and Zeitz. The subsequent volumes ("Fiasco," "Kaddish for an Unborn Child" and "Liquidation") portray him as an adult trying to make sense of his wartime experience through literature. So it may come as a surprise that Kertesz's new, very short novel not only leaves behind his fictional doppelgänger but avoids mention of the Holocaust altogether. "Detective Story" is the firstperson account of Antonio Rojas Martens, a lowranking member of the secret police in a nameless South American dictatorship. When the book begins, the dictator's despotic regime has collapsed and Martens is on death row, awaiting his execution for complicity in multiple murders. In order to "make sense of his fate," he seeks to explain his role in what is called the Salinas affair: the arrest, interrogation, torture and assassination of two members of the wealthy Salinas family who are suspected of plotting against the government. The detective narrative is not new to Kertesz. "Liquidation" follows an editor searching for a lost literary masterpiece, and "Fatelessness" unfolds like a mystery story: for much of the book, Koves, Kertesz's teenage alter ego, tries searchingly to figure out why, as a secular Hungarian Jew, he has been deported, where he is and what exactly he is witnessing. Although "Detective Story" contains noirish elements paranoia, subterfuge and, most of all, a gloomy sense of impending, implacable doom the intentional murkiness of the plot thwarts any expectations of a conventional whodunit Whether the Salinases are actually guilty of treason soon becomes irrelevant. Martens's real subject of investigation is what he calls "the logic," a term used to describe the elusive forces that govern an authoritarian state. The logic is what makes men like Martens join the secret police and blindly follow orders to commit atrocity; it's what enables more accomplished apparatchiks like Diaz, Martens's boss, to escape prosecution no matter what monstrosities they've committed in the name of the government; it influences the Salinases to cover up for crimes that they didn't even commit in the first place; and it leads Martens to realize, at the moment the Salinases come under suspicion, that the investigation will end with their deaths even if they are innocent. Near the end of "Fatelessness," Koves concludes that "if there is such a thing as freedom, then there is no fate." In "Detective Story," Kertesz offers a dark rebuke to this hypothesis: no, he seems to say, there is no such thing as freedom under authoritarian rule. Martens, after all, does not try to escape his doom. He is helpless to resist the state's orders, or its frightening fatalism. Instead he is in awe of its efficient machinery and wants to understand how it works. The novel is not ultimately a detective story but, as Kertesz writes, a "horror story." Unfortunately, in order to get to Kertesz's nuanced exploration of his theme one must overlook a surprising array of tonal miscues and awkward formulations, for which the translator, Tim Wilkinson, surely does not deserve all the blame. The Latin American secret police bluster like extras in a James Cagney picture ("Dern right!," "What in the blue blazes?," "What are you so windy about, sonny boy?"); the descriptive passages can be vague to the point of obviation (one character is repeatedly denoted by his "impeccable" suit and "fashionable" tie); and Kertesz exhibits several odd stylistic tics, like a compulsion to use a different synonym of the verb "to say" after each line of dialogue. So within a single conversation, two characters are said to have "growled," "probed," "ventured," "opined," "suggested," "ordered," "shrugged," "stated" and "concurred" before, mercifully, "they said no more." When put alongside the book's larger concerns, such complaints may appear trivial. Yet that's exactly why all of Kertesz's venturing and shrugging distracts so painfully from the difficult, haunting truth of what he has to say. Kertesz seems to say that there is no such thing as freedom under authoritarian rule. Nathaniel Rich is an editor at The Paris Review. His novel, "The Mayor's Tongue," will be published in April.
Library Journal Review
The Nobel prize winner takes us to jail to visit a man who was once a torturer for the secret police and now tries desperately to explain away his actions. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.