I recently read Imre Kertesz's Detective Story, and it's a slim and terrifying little novel. It's powerful, and yet part of its power is in its starkness. There's a detachment in the writing (that fits the first person narrator) which sets up the action very clearly. It's spare, with little description, little in the language to emote. It's the story of a South American government agent who is now in prison for torturing people under a now defunct regime. He relates a case of a father and son who were brought in for questioning.
The narrator is distant... and yet the story shimmers with emotion and feeling under the surface. It is that very distance, that sparcity, that allows this. The simpleness of actions set out clearly. Words, movements. Freed from the clutter they glow with meaning. There's an intensity to this, a sense of vividness, a flash of colour in a barren scene.
It's the use of white space not just in text, but in the story itself. Much of the subjective is stripped away, the wash of meaning imbued by the impressions of characters, by the narrator, by the writer. It is objective storytelling, in some senses, with the story pared down to its most basic. Words and actions. And their isolation brightens rather than dims their impact.
I've also read (Nobel Winner) Kertesz's brilliant Fatelessness, and it had a similar restrained power. It's a story of the holocaust, of a boy in the death camps. It, too, is told at a remove, and yet the horrors of the experience are all the more horrifying for that removal. There is no explanation of the actions, only the actions themselves, starkly revealed. Here the story must stand on its own feet, naked and unadorned. It must hold itself up, an orphaned boy in the selection line. No one will help that boy.
Certainly this is not the only way to tell a powerful story, and yet I find it interesting. The simplicity of it. I realize some of my other favourites embrace this technique. Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea, many of the stories of Cormac McCarthy. Though much of McCarthy's descriptive language is lush and extraordinary, the story itself is sparely told. You rarely, if ever, see inside the character's heads. Actions are simple and carefully delineated. He makes little attempt to interpret his characters for the reader, little attempt to decipher their words and actions.
Does anyone else have any favourites like this? Or, conversely, what are the stories that strike you profoundly, and how do they create their emotional impact?
