An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans
Dutch Literature
Original title – Het behouden huis
Translator -David Colmer
Source – Personal Copy
Well, it is back to Simon and Karen’s twice-yearly book club, where everyone is asked to read a book from a particular year. This time around, the year is 1952, as ever, I have taken that as the year the book was published in its original language, and I had to look hard to find some gems. This is the first book and is a Dutch classic. I first came across Willem Frederik Hermans when he was included on a list of the best Dutch novels ever compiled by NRC in 2007. At that time, some of the books on the list weren’t available, and over time, I have read a few from this list, but this is the first time I have got to Hermans. I decided he would be a writer, I leave for a rainy day, if that makes sense. He is considered one of the greatest post-war writers in his country.I decided it was time to read him as this is one of the earliest books from him as a writer, and before the two books that made the best Dutch novels (if this is the third best of his books, I can’t wait to read the other two at a later date). Do you have writers you have put on the back burner?
“Me from Spain when civil war,” he said. “Me Communist. Captured by French. In camp. Then escape. On ship. Turkey. Russia.”
Having got this far, he began to talk faster, using more and more Spanish words. It seemed that Russia had not lived up to expectations. That was why, for the first time since leaving the German sphere of influence, I said, “Me no Communist!”
He laughed.
“Merde! Tout ça, merde!”
“Comrade! Give me a cigarette!” Talking had only made me thirstier. He didn’t even have a canteen.
He broke his last cigarette in half and lay down,
leaning on one elbow.
“What you do?” he asked, making it clear that he wanted to know what I had done long ago, before the war.
The partisan had been all over during the war !
The book is told by a Dutch Partisan who is heading back after fighting; he had just killed five Germans on the Eastern Front in the tail end of the Second World War. So when he happens across a near-perfect villa after being sent there, he finds the house is clear of booby traps and then decides to take of his uniform and have his first bath in a very long time and puts on some clothes he finds in the house. So when a troop of Germans are sent to secure the house, they think he is the owner of the house. Later on, the actual owner of the house appears, and the partisan thinks he is actually a local who has come to clean the windows. Then there is a single room with a locked door leading to a bedroom, where someone is obviously on the other side. SO, what happens when the real owner and his wife have paper, and who is in the locked room? I leave these threads for you to discover by reading the book.
The house itself wasn’t that big, but all of its parts were. The windows were single sheets of reflective glass; the portal was as high as two floors; a balcony stretched across the entire façade.
There was a sloping, dark green lawn with a large plane tree in the middle that had been pollarded so many times it now looked like a gallows with room for an entire family. The front door, made of glass and wrought iron, was well ajar.
The house is almost a character itself in the book
I loved this book, it is one of those miniature epics of a book that is less than a hundred pages long, but to the reader it feels like a hell of a lot more than that !. It has an authentic thriller style to the writing, a sense of violence and death happening at every turn, which keeps you gripped as a reader. It is also about regret, as the story seems to be someone looking back on the events. There is a certain feel of being a little too used to the killing and bloodshed of war, if that makes sense. It is also a book that is very tightly written; there isn’t a wasted scene or passage in this book. It is so neatly written. Have you read Hermans? There is also a fascinating afterword by Cees Nooteboom about the book, Hermans, and Dutch literature. He said this on my blog about Dutch literature and mentioned Hermans in an interview he did for the blog 14 years ago. “The Dutch are a rather special tribe, like the English, but smaller.On the other hand, Holland is not an island. It has taken the world a long time to recognise that there are some interesting writers out there, like Hermans, Mulisch, Claus, Mortier, van Dis, Grunberg, and many others. And of course, it does not help that we know much more about English writers than English readers know about Dutch literature. A small language can be a prison. Translation is liberation,” Cees Nooteboom . I love the last word of that quote
Related
Published by
