The mystery of cruelty

The story goes that Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz was given a diary for his 10th birthday, but was frightened by its white pages. A diary now figures prominently in the newly translated “Detective Story,” a novel in which the lines between self-expression, criminal confession and terror are blurred. The putative blank page at the center of this book is the mystery that drives it: What is root of cruelty?

This is not uncharted territory for Mr. Kertesz. In “Fateless,” his surpassing first novel, he told the story of a young concentration camp survivor who tries to explain his experience to those who did not share the same fate. In the novels that followed — “Fiasco,”“Liquidation,” “Kaddish for a Child Not Born” — he portrayed characters who struggle to communicate about that which is unfathomable and ultimately unspeakable.

As with earlier works, there is no mistaking the overlay of the Holocaust here. For Mr. Kertesz, who was deported to Auschwitz at the age of 15, it is an unmistakable point of reference for — if not the source of — fiction often deemed to be autobiographical.

While the shadow of the Holocaust cannot be ignored in this book, the setting is not Germany or Poland but an unnamed country presumably in Latin America. It is told from the point of view of Antonio Martens, a former policeman who is awaiting trial for murders committed on behalf of a dictatorship recently put out of power. The diary that plays an important part in the book belongs to one of the men over whose surveillance, interrogation and torture Martens presided.

The book opens as something of a story within a story. The man who is Martens’ lawyer says he has a manuscript entrusted to him by his client. The lawyer writes: “Do not be surprised by his way with words. In Martens’s eyes the world must have seemed like pulp fiction come true, with everything taking place in accordance with the monstrous certainty and dubious regularities of the unvarying dramatic form — or choreography, if you prefer — of a horror story. Let me add, not in his defense but merely for the sake of truth, that this horror story was written not by Martens alone but by reality, too.”

However disturbing and ambiguous that last sentence is, it is matched in spades by what transpires. Martens tells how he worked for the Corps, a security unit that seems to come straight out of a Kafka novel. Neighbor is pitted against neighbor, family member against family member, until an eerie and inevitably paranoid fever reigns within the populace. It is a world best described by Diaz, one of Martens’ creepy underlings: “Those in power first, then the law.”

When the young Enrique Salinas falls afoul of Martens and his gang, hardly no time at all expires before Enrique and his father are thrown into prison, tortured and ultimately executed.

As Martens tries to sort through what he has done and confess to his shortcomings, he relies heavily on the diary of Enrique that came into his possession during the surveillance period. Most of it chronicles the stifling atmosphere of the totalitarian society in which he finds himself, a society that prevents him from living as he likes and loving as he would like.

“I took a stroll in the city. It was infernally hot. The usual evening hubbub around me. Lovers on the pavements, hurrying to cinemas and other places of amusement as if nothing had happened, nothing… . There are these police types everywhere, eavesdropping, sniffing around, and they think nobody is paying any attention to them. They’re right too; people don’t pay them any attention. All it has taken is a few months, and already they have grown accustomed to them.”

One unintended consequence of Enrique’s arrest and confinement is the closeness it encourages between father and son. But it is cold comfort in a riveting tale that moves inexorably toward an awful end.

And Martens’ excuse doesn’t make it much better. “We had got wind of an impending atrocity. We had to prevent it, or at least try, with every means at our disposal: Homeland and Colonel demanded that of us. The shaggy-haired weirdos all went into hiding. We circulated their details nationally but with about as much success as if we had been searching, let’s say, for half a dozen irregularly yellow-striped Colorado beetles in a twenty-five-thousand-acre field of potatoes.”

In the end, one comes as close to understanding the metaphysics of evil as one can. In this small volume, Mr. Kertesz gives the innocent and courageous Salinas family its voice, which in this life-denying universe is the next best thing to vengeance.

DETECTIVE STORY

By Imre Kertesz

Translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson

Knopf, $21, 128 pages