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A review by kris_mccracken
Detective Story by Imre Kertész
3.0
Something of an inversion of the traditional hard-boiled detective novel, this one puts us into the mind of a cog in the brutal security apparatus of an unnamed Latin American country involved in the suppression of the people.
This is a highly staged police procedural, with our main narrator a chilling figure. Although he is ‘the new boy’, the furthest down the pecking order of a secret police unit designed to ‘upholder of the needs of the Homeland’ and perhaps the least despicable of that unit, he remains a torturer and exponent of the kind of extra-judicial murder that such ‘dirty wars’ are known for.
In the end, the mystery is really not much of a mystery. The real crux of the story is what drives the exponents of state repression, and explores the dark truths of the work of the secret police. As a work, it isn’t perfect (for instance, I’m never really convinced that we are in Latin America, as much of the manner and tone jars), but it is a worthwhile contribution to trying to understand some of the darker impulses of society.
This is a highly staged police procedural, with our main narrator a chilling figure. Although he is ‘the new boy’, the furthest down the pecking order of a secret police unit designed to ‘upholder of the needs of the Homeland’ and perhaps the least despicable of that unit, he remains a torturer and exponent of the kind of extra-judicial murder that such ‘dirty wars’ are known for.
In the end, the mystery is really not much of a mystery. The real crux of the story is what drives the exponents of state repression, and explores the dark truths of the work of the secret police. As a work, it isn’t perfect (for instance, I’m never really convinced that we are in Latin America, as much of the manner and tone jars), but it is a worthwhile contribution to trying to understand some of the darker impulses of society.