The Assault by Harry Mulisch Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Assault
Book Review: Haunted and haunting
Summary: 5 Stars
In a Haarlem street the Dutch Resistance kills an active collaborator. In retaliation the Germans have destroyed a house in that street in which live ten-year-oldAnton Steenwijk with his parents and elder brother. Anton survives, but his parents and brother are killed. As Anton grows up, he wants to suppress all memories of that time, and it is not a coincidence that he chooses to become an anaesthetist. But of course the trauma is buried within him, and affects his mental life in many ways, some that are inexplicable to him. But the members of the resistance who had carried out the assassination are haunted also, by their knowledge that their deed had led to uninvolved people being shot. All these states of mind are explored in this story, as much that lay concealed emerges over the 36 years after the event. The reader is engaged as taut knots are loosened and unwound.
During all this time the world moves on and new political issues arise - Vietnam; the anti-nuclear movement. Do they leave the old issues behind or are they connected with them?
This short book's limpid prose is very precise, profound and rich in unobtrusive symbolism. It is all very compelling
Book Review: Haunted by a history the victim wants to forget
Summary: 5 Stars
The most widely distributed Dutch novel and the source of a film that won the best foreign-language movie Academy Award in the late 1980s, Harry Mulisch's compressed (185-page) 1982 novel is a powerful account of a man who does not want to learn more about the trauma of his youth at the end of the Second World War, but cannot escape it. The Truth--a quite complicated truth--seems to seek him out and press itself on him. The non-hero eventually learns not only "whodunit," but why some puzzling events occurred.The novel is absorbing (I had to stay up and finish reading it) and superbly crafted. . . and more heartbreaking even than the initial horror of the boy losing his home and whole family in one night. My only doubt is about sparing a twelve-year-old from reprisals. Although such reprisals were more common Nazi practice in Poland and Greece than among conquered fellow "Aryans," I think that deciding to spare and help a nine- or ten-year-old would have been less open to question and that the perceptions of the 1945 night that are recorded could be those of a younger child.
Book Review: History is not black and white
Summary: 5 Stars
Thank you Harry. I read this book years ago and I can only recommend it to anyone that really wants to know what happened in Nazi-occupied countries. This is not necessarily about the Netherlands only. You may take any of the countries under Nazi rule. Mulisch describes what happens to a man who starts investigating into the death of his family during WWII and he slowly finds out that things were not the way people thought. History books may tell us facts but they cannot reveal the human tragedies that happen.
Book Review: Impressive!
Summary: 5 Stars
The novel is about one incident, but still spans 38 years. It starts when a police officer who collaborates with the German occupiers of Holland is being assaulted and shot. In revenge, the Germans burn the house in front of which he was found, but somebody had been dragging the body around... why? The main person, a boy from the house, loses his parents and brother in the killings that take place because of the assault. He grows up in another city, and becomes a doctor. His encounters with some persons (e.g. the son of the police officer) are being documented, and his philosophical musings over the subject. Only after 38 years he finds out what really happened... (I read the originial, Dutch version.)Book Review: Interesting
Summary: 5 Stars
this book was tottaly amazing. It had every feeling and it felt like i was there in the second world war. a definte book to look into for the Mulisch-lovers.