Imre Kertész is the winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for fiction. Damn! Another well known and serious writer not known to me. My late life project to read one book by all Nobel Literature prize winners since I’ve been alive –1943– took another step backward after an invigorating step forward with Herta Muller’s The Land of Green Plums when she was announced the 2009 winner. As I read somewhere recently every advance in what we know only serves to put us in the vestibule of all we don’t know.
Of the last ten winners Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio (2008) , Elfriede Jelinek (2004) [except for the film version of her Piano Teacher] and Kertész (2002) were complete ciphers. Which to being with? Kertész seemed to be most kin to me, the most interested in that which interests (baffles, wounds, terrifies) me: the ease with which ordinary human beings — those who comb their daughter’s hair and grow gardens on the week-end– enter into radical evil.
Kertész himself was picked up as a young adolescent and taken to Auschwitz then to Buchenwald. He survived and returned to Budapest after his release. He worked as a journalist for some years until the censorship and press monitoring of the regime drove him out of the profession. He turned to translation, for which he has been generally acclaimed, and began to write his novels. The first, Fateless [Fatelessness in some editions] was released in 1975 after almost a decade of delay while searching for a publisher. It only arrived in an English translation by Christopher and Katharina Wilson in 1992. Following the awarding of the prize a new translation by Tim Wilkinson was published in 2004.
Fateless follows the paths of many such books — a memoir or a fiction, in which the author-as-character details the days of his or her waiting in fear, the turning away of friends and neighbors, the arrest and transportation to the camps, the unbelievable weeks and months of starvation, cruelty and death. Through the specific and excruciating details of their own, and others’ suffering the writer raises the necessary moral and human questions transcending that personal experience asking us all to make part of our understanding what has happened and what may happen again. Andre Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just, Eli Wiesel’s Night, Primo Levi’s If This Be a Man are but a few of the most memorable of this genre. Fateless may not join the highest ranks, but deserves a place on the must- read shelf for the uncommon sensibility of the narrator who, as he arrives back in Budapest, is neither interested in a personal newspaper expose of his experience in the camps, nor of “forgetting everything” so he can begin life anew, as his elderly uncles counsel him.
He will not let their perception that “it came to pass” that his father was taken away, that the ghetto “came about,” the yellow stars “came about.” “It all came to pass isn’t entirely accurate because we did it step by step,” he says. “We can never start a new life. We can only continue the old one. I took my own steps. No one else did … Do you want all this horror and all my previous steps to lose their meaning entirely? … Why can’t you see that if there is such a thing as fate, then there is no freedom? If, on the other hand…there is freedom, then there is no fate. That is … we ourselves are fate.”
Detective Story is another matter. Here Kertész attempts what few others have tried — to enter into the life of the captor, the jailer, the torturer and give us the world as he must have understood it. Another that comes to mind which attempts this entering-into-the-other is the incredible Götz and Meyer by David Albahari, though Albahari himself is too young to have experienced such imprisonment and torture himself.
The voice of the Detective Story belongs to Antonio Martens, now in prison himself and on trial for murders he participated in while one of a three man team of interrogators during a coup in an un-named South American country. He had been the youngest, and newest — an intern, so to speak– and therefore a step removed from the actions of the other two whose personalities and activities form one pole of the story. Diaz is the smooth expert in interrogation, leading a suspect “like a dancing master” through the necessary denials, silences, false leads to the end desired. As it is put, “Any person who was in the records was going to end up a suspect sooner or later.” And once a suspect, of course, the “logic” of the system is that guilt will be found.
Rodriguez is the muscle of the group, the man with “eyes like a leopard,” the man who has installed in a nearby room his “theater of operation,” featuring the infamous Boger swing of Nazi invention.
The other pole of the story are the Salinas men, Father and son. Federigo is the wealthy owner of the Salinas department stores. Because of his wealth and status we are given to believe he thinks himself immune from the turmoil beginning to churn as the heady early years of the coup are waning. His son Enrique is at first seen as a spoiled rich boy but as Martens reveals his own detective work to us we see the son’s rebelliousness against the father, his self disgust at not doing something meaningful, his attempt to join other young people in a resistance, being chased away as untrustworthy because of his wealth and presumed class loyalties.
“I’ve had a bellyfull of my life. Break with this inaction, emerge from the stillness!… I have to speak. More: to act. To make an attempt at leading alife that I shall try to make worth the trouble of living it.”
Martens tells us this, not as an omniscient narrator but as a detective, one who has Enrique’s’ diary with him in his cell, one who is able to say:
“Don’t go thinking I am just making up these exchanges. I wasn’t there of course, how could I have been? But they have passed through my hands. I have seen them and heard them, watched them and interrogated them. I made records of what they said, to the point that all at once the records began to take charge of me.”
And we begin to feel the slow creeping chill of a full-surveillance state, what it means to be known intimately by those who seek your culpability in something –anything.
Through the slow, somewhat puzzling start — references to events we don’t yet know about but which are spoken of as though we do, names we do not yet have clear, the relations between interrogators and interogatees become clear — unevenly, like a photograph developing in its chemical bath. Martens begins to unfold the story of how Enrique and Federigo were ensnared, how he, Martens, came to see “the logic” of the system, how he retained some shred of an ability to later reflect on what he had done. As the book begins he is on trial and wants to try to explain himself. Rodriquez, the sadist, has already been executed. Diaz, as is foreshadowed early in the novel, has disappeared, too slick to be caught or held accountable for his crimes.
As we read, trying to discover the mystery of who these characters are and what they have to do with each other, and the detective, Martens, reveals how the suspects were discovered and brought to the firing-wall he also reveals, and we see, the terrible “logic” of a system set up to remove all enemies, actual or invented. The suspicious actions Enrique is brought in for lead, after a laconic reference to the Boger swing, to his “untouchable” father, the elder Salinas. After a polite, formal dance of innuendo between Salinas and Diaz the deference to class and wealth is over.
Diaz stands up and switches on the lamp. He makes his way ponderously around the desk and parks one buttock on it. Right in front of Salinas.
Rodriguez gets up and steps over to Salinas’s side.
I move behind his back.
“What do you people want?” Salinas is startled.
“Nothing in particular, Mr. Salinas,” Diaz replies. “We just have a few questions for you.”
“And so it begins – much as I have already described.
Salinas proved a tough customer; he really tested our patience to the limit. He cracked only after we brought his son up – literally brought him, as he was unable to walk.”
Threatened with further mutilation the father reveals that the secret rendezvous’, the notes passed, were nothing but a game he had created in order to engage his son in something emotionally and morally satisfying without actually committing himself to the resistance.
Others are brought it who Salinas says can prove the truth of his claims.
Don’t expect to learn what else happened that evening. It was no longer an interrogation but a poker game. I was still a new boy, as I have said; only then I had I begun to see where I was and what I had taken on. I knew, of course, that a different yardstick applied in the Corps — but I believed there was at least a yardstick. Well, there wasn’t: don’t expect me to tell you what happened that evening.
Adding to the growing chill of discovery as we read is the laconic voice of the author. Terror by implication. We hear no direct images or reports of the torture. Indeed the Boger swing is mentioned, but not described. Like the great movies of earlier generations we are left to imagine the screams, the shredded flesh, without full color close-ups of the work.
The opening chapter, as is true with many “difficult” books, must be re-read after finishing to complete the circle of ideas and thought. It is a “preface” by Martens’ defense attorney to the manuscript following. His client had asked the him for pen and paper.
“What do you wish to write about?” I asked him
“About how I grasped the logic, ” he replied,
“Now?” I was flabbergasted. “You mean you didn’t understand it during your actions?”
“No,” he said. “Not during them. There was a time before when I understood, and now I have understood again. During one’s actions, though one forgets.”
Thus Kertész begins and leaves us with the terrible story — terrible in its details, and terrible in its implications unless somehow, I think, writing like this can begin to provide vaccinations against the most dreadful of human illnesses — succumbing to the security of hating others, in the arms of a system powerful enough to arrange the logic of it all.
The 2008 translation by Tim Wilkinson is good, with occasional odd Englishisms that lodge in the American ear: ”Playtime’s over. You’ve been rumbled.” Or a modernism that seems not right c0ming from the mouth of a Latin American: “Son…why aren’t you being straight with me?” Over all it does its work, bringing Hungarian into English so the story itself, the characters and ideas are clear and visible, the language suitable to both and not calling attention to itself.
Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize of course not for one book, or two, but the sum of his work and thought. Though he started late in life there is much to be read and considered, essays as well as fiction. Put him on your shelf.
As for myself I might renew my acquaintance with Doris Lessing, whose Golden Notebooks moved so many of us in our rebellious youth. Perhaps re-read it, more hopeful than her later “Children of Violence” series, or take a recommendation from one of you. I’ll have to put off Jelinek for a while. Even a title like Wonderful, Wonderful Times, hides extremes of human behavior. She doesn’t need the Nazis to examine depravity. As one reviewer has it: “Wonderful, Wonderful Times serves as a brutal companion piece to The Piano Teacher; whereas the former is about the morbidity within the instructor, this one explores the sick tendencies inherent in the pupils.”
I think I’ll wait until I really need a good depression….
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