The Assault by Harry Mulisch
Dutch ficition
Original title – De Aanslag
Translator – Claire Nicolas White
Source – Personal copy
In the last year, I found two old books by Harry Mulisch. A writer who has been on my list of writers to get to at some point. I tried to read his best-known book a few years ago when Iris on Books did a read-along of Discovery of Heaven, but I just couldn’t get into it at the time. That book was also in 2007 named as the best dutch book of all time. So it is a book I want to read at some point. But in the years in between I had found three other books by him and felt it was time to read him. He was one of what the Dutch call the big three post war writers in Holland . This book was his best known until he wrote Discovery of Heaven, as it was made into a very successful film.
As her husband had done before her, she drew back from the freezing silence. Nothing stirred. There was the garden, and beyond it the barren, snow-covered lots. Anton too stood motionless. Everything was still-and yet time went by. It was as if everything grew radiant with the passage of time, like pebbles at the bottom of a brook. Peter had disappeared, a corpse lay in front of the door, and all about them the armed men remained motionless. Anton had the feeling that by doing something which was within his power but which he could not quite think of, he could undo everything and return to the way they had been before, sitting around the table playing a game. It was as if he had forgotten a name remembered a hundred times before and now on the tip of his tongue, but the harder he tried to recall it, the more elusive it became. Or it was like the time when he had suddenly realised that he was breathing in and out continuously and must make sure to keep doing it or else suffocate- and at that moment he almost did suffocate.
On that fateful night his parents died
The book centres on Anton Steenwijk. When his whole family is killed, he is the sole survivor. This is a repercussion when a Pro-Nazi collaborator, Fake Ploeg, was found dead. His parents and siblings were among 29 people killed by the Nazis that night after one of their neighbours moved the dead man’s body in front of Anton’s parents’ house. The book is told over the next thirty-plus years, starting with the events of that evening. To Anton getting to live with his relatives after the deaths..We see how he copes with those event. Anton doesn’t want to face those events of the night, and it is many years before he returns to his old home in Haarlem. The events of that night have a memorial to what happened. But over the years, as he ends up as a medic, he is an anesthesiologist doing well at school. But it is in his home life you can see the damage of the night when he has two marriages and kids . It isn’t until his kids have kids of their own that he finally faces his own ghost and past.
He finished the gymnasium as a fair to middling student and went on to medical school. By then a lot had been published about the Occupation, but he didn’t bother to read any of it, or any of the novels and stories about those days.
Nor did he go to the State Institute for War Information, where he might have found out all that was known about the death of Fake Ploeg, and exactly how Peter had met his death. The family of which he had been a member had been exterminated once and for all; it was enough to be aware of this. All he knew was that the assault had never been brought to trial, for in that case he would have been questioned.
He does well at school after all this happend
I really liked this book. I enjoyed books that take slices of people’s lives; it’s like looking at the rings of a tree: the good years and bad years. Here, there is also how people confronted the past in Holland after the war, where the population was divided so much by those that resisted the Nazis and those that collaborated. But over the years, we get crumbs of the events of that evening, and Anton’s own memories of that night slowly piece together. This is a thriller in a way, a book that shows how time and memory can twist and turn over time, and how one person’s memory of a night may differ from the whole course of events that night. I hope to root out the film of this at some point; it is a book that would make a great film. Have you read this book or any other books by Harry Mulisch?
