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by: Imre Kertesz  List Price: $21.00 Amazon.com's Price: $14.28 You Save: $6.72 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Binding: HardcoverDewey Decimal Number: 894.511334 EAN: 9780307266446 ISBN: 0307266443 Label: Knopf Manufacturer: Knopf Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 128 Publication Date: January 22, 2008 Publisher: Knopf Release Date: January 22, 2008 Studio: Knopf Related Items:
Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display Editorial Review: Product Description: As readers, we are accustomed to reading stories of war and injustice from the victims’ point of view, sympathizing with their plight. In Detective Story, the tables have been turned, leaving us in the mind of a monster, as Nobel Laureate Imre Kertész plunges us into a story of the worst kind, told by a man living outside morality. Now in prison, Antonio Martens is a torturer for the secret police of a recently defunct dictatorship. He requests and is given writing materials in his cell, and what he has to recount is his involvement in the surveillance, torture, and assassination of Federigo and Enrique Salinas, a prominent father and son whose principled but passive opposition to the regime left them vulnerable to the secret police. Preying on young Enrique’s aimless life, the secret police began to position him as a subversive and then targeted his father. Once this plan was set into motion, any means were justified to reach the regime’s chosen end—the destruction of an entire liberal class. Inside Martens’s mind, we inhabit the rationalizing world of evil and see firsthand the inherent danger of inertia during times of crisis. A slim, explosive novel of justice railroaded by malevolence, Detective Story is a warning cry for our time. Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Disturbing, Remarkable CraftsmanshipI read Imre Kertesz' short novel "Detective Story" in two days, between a plane, a train, and a bus ride. And although one's standards for reading material may go down during the long, lonely hours of interstate travel, I'm sure that I would have been engrossed by the book even if I was on the beach or just spending a day at home. The basic story arc of Detective Story is clear as day from the book blurb: a man explains his role in the tracking, arrest, and eventual tortures of two political ... Read More Rating: - Read and weep--or screamFor this novel, there is no "setting"--as readers of novels are accustomed--because the entire story unravels, journal-like, from the point of view of one person, Antonio Rojas Martens. This former henchman now awaits trial for the crimes he committed in the service of an unnamed Latin or South American regime. It seems that the setting is Galtieri's Argentina or Pinochet's Chile since this novel was originally published in 1977, and only now available in English. Regarding the character's name Rojas Martens, ... Read More Rating: - State Authority Without Moral or Legal RestraintFate declared that Imre Kertesz's life, or at least his writing, would be entirely shaped by his teenage experiences as a Hungarian Jew in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Rather than `fate', perhaps one should refer to the "barbaric arbitrariness of history" (the phrase used by the Nobel Prize for Literature committee in 2002). His other works available in English, 'Fateless', 'Liquidation', and 'Kaddish for an Unborn Child' reflect his past more directly than `Detective Story'. Nonetheless, `Detective ... Read More Rating:  - Where's the "monster"?Imre Kertesz wrote this slim 112 page novella. He is a Death Camp survivor and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002. The setting for this book is an unnamed Latin American country in the 1970s. A new military dictatorship is in power using the secret police to "deal with" revolutionaries with intimidation and fear. The story is told by Antonio Rojas Martens, a low ranking member of the secret police who sits on death row awaiting his execution. He was implicated for the arrest, interrogation, torture ... Read More Rating: - "Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of historyat its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means." from Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon "Detective Story", Hungarian Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz's novella is set in a prison in an unnamed South American country. An oppressive regime has just been overturned and the protagonist, former secret police detective Antonio Martens, is sitting in prison after a trial and conviction for the unlawful arrest, torture, and execution of Enrique ... Read More 
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