Detective Story

by: Imre Kertesz

Published by: Vintage

Reviewed by Nicole M. Winget

Imre Kertesz, Nobel laureate, brings us another psychologically wrenching novel with Detective Story. The moment you start the first page, you will realize this is a novel unlike you have every read. The story is presented as a written confession of a torturer from a Latin American dictatorship. This torturer describes the part he played in the hunt, capture, and torture of a father and son who are suspected of undermining the regime.

The torturer bares his soul in the form of a confession. . He seems to be battling two feelings: One of sickness at the part he played in orchestrating someone else’s nightmare–and one of rage that he is the one left by his team to face the slaughter. The author weaves the characters and background together with dark humor and compelling narrative in a unique and gripping account of how human nature can twist unexpectedly into something evil.

This is a very quick read with a low page count and an impossible-to-put-down pace. Those who have read Imre Kertesz’s earlier work will find Detective Story is the next jewel in his crown. Those who are unfamiliar with his work will have found a new author to relish.

Detective Story is a gripping and exciting novel that will leave you stunned, mouth agape, wondering what hit you.

Kertesz was born in 1929 in Budapest, Hungary and at the age of 14 he was deported with other Hungarian Jews during World War II to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.”

Armchair Interviews says: Powerful read that will stay with you a long time.