Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jan 2008
128 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
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 ....
"Starred Review. The novel, which takes place in a vaguely Central American country, was originally published in Hungary in 1977. But because it references the decades-old Holocaust and yet could still easily be set in contemporary times, it illustrates the heartbreaking timelessness of this cancer of hatred. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries." - Library Journal.
"This relevant and timely political allegory will remind many of J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." - Publishers Weekly.
"This short, spare book, a fable about what governments do and the guilt a man tries to stop feeling, can be read in a couple of hours; its bleak, despairing effect will haunt for much longer." - Los Angeles Times, Richard Rayner.
"Ultimately, this slender novel reads like a preliminary sketch, not the Orwellian fable the author had perhaps intended. Something is lacking and that, perhaps, is a sense of plausibility. Martens's motives for dispensing such horrific violence remain obscure: clearly Kertesz likes the mystery of the unresolved ... It remains a bleak essay on the corrupting tendency of power." - The Guardian (UK).
This information about Detective Story was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Imre Kertész was born in 1929 and imprisoned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a youth. He worked as a journalist and playwright before publishing his first novel, in 1975. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. He lives in Budapest and Berlin. This book is translated by Tim Wilkinson.
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