Carole Angier reviews Imre Kertész’s new novel
Fatelessness, Imre Kertész’s first novel, fitted one of the coolest accounts we have of Auschwitz into a mere 262 pages. Detective Story, his third, distills it still further into 113, each of them mercilessly sharp and clear.
This time Kertész sets his story in an unnamed South American dictatorship; but there are several connections. Like Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, the Colonel’s regime lasts only a few years; one of his torturers carries a book about Auschwitz; and their two main victims are Jewish.
Like many of the Nazis’ victims, Federigo and Enrique Salinas are wealthy, educated and assimilated members of their society. The perpetrators — apart from the Colonel, who calls them, affectionately, his ‘filthy little piggies’ — are Diaz the chief, Rodriguez the sadist and Antonio Martens, the ‘new boy’ and our narrator. Into these few characters, as into his 113 pages, Kertész packs the whole range of victims and perpetrators.
Or rather, interestingly, not quite the whole range. Among the victims we meet only the innocent and apolitical — Enrique, who wants to join the resistance but hasn’t yet, and his father and his fiancée, who want to stop him. This too is a reflection of the Jews of Europe, who unlike the Basques, or Irish, or Muslims today, never formed an armed resistance. And in the clashes between Enrique, Federigo and Jill we hear the classic arguments over opposition to oppressive regimes by such innocent and (so far) unaffected citizens. People like us have no reason to resist, Federigo says; let’s just be happy, Jill pleads. ‘One can’t be happy in a place where everybody is unhappy,’ Enrique insists. But you have only one life, Federigo replies: if you don’t live it now, you will only lose it forever.
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