"Detective Story," by Imre Kertesz; Knopf ($21)

___

Why is it that the work Americans are exposed to after an obscure European novelist wins the Nobel Prize so often bemuses rather than satisfies?

Such is the case with Imre Kertesz's "Detective Story," set in an unnamed South American country during an oppressive military dictatorship. That generic title is instructive. Kertesz casts his narrative in the frame of a hard-boiled police procedural, that durable genre so useful to writers from Ed McBain to Georges Simenon to the great Swedish team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. But like Hemingway's "The Killers," or Camus' "The Stranger," his aim is higher than suspense or entertainment.

"Detective Story" is told in retrospect as the confession of a secret policeman awaiting execution for various tortures and political murders during the recently deposed military regime. Antonio Martens, an ambitious young police officer, had not been with "the Corps" long, and the crimes he saw and committed in its name have left him sickened with remorse.

"I am an honest flatfoot, I always was," Martens declares near the beginning, "and I take my work seriously. Of course, I was aware that a different yardstick applied here at the Corps, but I thought at least there was a yardstick. Well, there wasn't, and that was when my headaches started."

Working with the sadistic Rodriguez and their superior, Diaz - "the ever-unruffled and ever-soothing Diaz" - Martens sets about the business of keeping track of suspected revolutionaries, bringing them in for "interrogation" once their guilt seems assured. When Martens protests Rodriguez's zeal, saying he thought "we were serving the law here," Diaz corrects him: "Those in power, sonny boy."

"Detective Story" soon devolves upon a single case when Enrique Salinas, an angsty rich boy, comes to the Corps' attention. From the moment surveillance begins, he is doomed.

"In short, our records had already identified that Enrique was going to perpetuate something sooner or later. As far as we were concerned, his fate was sealed, even if he himself had not yet made up his mind. He was hesitating, playing for time. He roamed the streets or wrote in his diary, raced around in his Alfa Romeo, visited friends, or popped into bed with some silky-smooth kitten, if he happened to feel so inclined. Enrique Salinas was young, just twenty-two; his long hair, his wisp of a mustache and beard alone marked him as suspicious in our eyes."

Misunderstandings on all sides soon implicate Enrique's father Federigo, a wealthy and well-connected department store magnate, perhaps as a mastermind. The story's considerable suspense rises from the ways in which the guiltless Salinas family, through a series of youthful recklessness and excessive fatherly caution, contrive to make their arrests inevitable. The poignancy of the twist - what exactly father and son were up to - is the strongest emotion evoked in the book.

The Hungarian-born Kertesz, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002, is best known for novels ("Fatelessness," "Kaddish for an Unborn Child," "Liquidation") that follow the impact of the Holocaust on a survivor at different stages of life. Imprisoned at Auschwitz at age 14, he resolutely denies his novels are autobiographical.

"Detective Story" marks Kertesz's first foray outside Jewish subject matter or a European setting. Yet his characteristic themes are everywhere present, as when Rodriguez, early in the narrative, delivers an anti-Semitic tirade that seems outside the scope of the narrative, as Jews do not figure in the story, and, of course, anti-Semitism is not a prerequisite for authoritarian repression. This somewhat jarring note serves the purpose, however, of explicitly linking the atrocities suffered by South Americans with those of European Jews, suggesting that political torture and murder, wherever it arises, serves the same impulse, even when it is not a matter of genocide.

"Detective Story" is the kind of short novel that repays rereading. Its effects, wrought with subtlety and craftsmanship, tend to suppress the humanity of its characters the first time through, leaving us little moved by their tragedy. A casual reader might protest that too little care is expended on the police procedural framework for the existential seriousness Kertesz asks it to support.

Reading the novel a second time, however, reveals the necessary elements were present all along. What seemed indistinct and colorless before suddenly sharpens into vivid clarity. Enrique, Federigo and Martens - and, indeed, Rodriguez and Diaz - become more than types, and what happens, or doesn't happen, to them matters.