Bøger af Harry Mulisch

With an introduction by Thomas HardingDuring the winter of 1945, the last dark days of World War II stretch out in occupied Holland as the populace wait for the Allies to arrive. A Dutch Nazi collaborator, Fake Ploeg, infamous for his cruelty, is assassinated as he rides home on his bicycle. His body is moved from one family's doorstep to another along the same road and the remaining Germans retaliate by burning down the final house and killing its inhabitants. Only their twelve-year-old son Anton survives. The Assault traces the complex repercussions of this horrific incident on Anton's life. Determined to forget, he opts for a carefully normal existence: a prudent marriage, a successful career as an anaesthesiologist, and colorless passivity. But the past keeps breaking through, in relentless memories and in chance encounters with others who were involved in the assassination and its aftermath, until Anton finally learns what really happened that night in 1945-and why. Powerful in its emotional restraint, lucid on the hardest of moral questions and fiercely moving, The Assault is an excavation of Dutch collaboration, resistance and the terrible collateral damage wrought on innocent people in times of war

"This is the highest kind of achievement of which fiction is capable. . . . Ranks with the finest European fiction of recent years."-The Christian Science MonitorUli Bouwmeester is a retired variety artiste who spends his days whiling away his time. Out of the blue, an invitation arrives to play the leading part in a new drama at the Actor's Theater in Amsterdam, and he is flung with a vengeance from the monotony of life in the suburbs into the reality of the 1980s. All goes well until a television crew arrives to interview Uli, revealing a secret from his past that threatens not only the success of the theater's enterprise but also Uli's life."In his corner of Europe, Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch is creating some of the more haunting, provocative fiction to emerge from the continent in the past decade."-New York Newsday