![]() ![]() ![]() He doesn’t know whether he is at the front or the back of the offensive, and he thinks back to his fellow soldiers, many of whom - from countries all over Europe - he cannot even understand. A “Hollander” soldier is fighting in World War II with partisan allied forces. ![]() We open in medias res and amidst cacophonous confusion. This sense of a destruction just barely dissembled pervades throughout, as surfaces slip away to reveal monstrous absurdity. The square book fits easily into a jacket pocket, but the ninety-nine pages of narrative are so explosive as to make one feel like you’re smuggling a weapon - something efficient and brutal, like the hand grenade that the protagonist lobs in the final pages. Willem Frederik Hermans’s diminutive novella An Untouched House(1952) - “ Het behouden huis” in Dutch - has been released in a new translation by Archipelago Books. ![]()
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