The Assault by Harry Mulisch Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Assault
Book Review: Sad but moving
Summary: 5 Stars
One of the best books ever written. The writing is wonderful but the story itself is the soul. Through tragic circumstances I found hope and understanding It is moving without being preachy. Though sad it touched me deeply.Book Review: Simply a must-read masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
1945. The Second World War is running to its end. A cold winters evening in the Dutch city of Haarlem. The Steenwijk family is sitting around a small fire. Suddenly six gunshots disturb the silence outside. Then a singular cry of pain. Never will Anton Steenwijk forget the images of that dreadful day when he, at the age of twelve, losses almost everything. Now, years later, he has to suffer those horrors again, when the truth finally starts to unfold.Although the setting is clearly World War II, this story is not relating the heroics of soldiers or people active in the resistance. It describes the personal search for truth of a man who doesn't realise how much impact things he thought to have banished from memory have on his life. During his search he stumbles onto information that will change him completely.
The way Harry Mulisch has depicted the person of Anton Steenwijk is undoubtedly the most powerful asset of this book. Anton does not want to find the truth, but still the truth wants to be found. And what he unwillingly uncovers does not only startle him, but also leaves the reader with topics to think about. Isn't everybody guilty and not guilty at the same time?
This book reads like a train and engulfs the reader to the extend that he will never be able to forget the history of Anton Steenwijk.
Book Review: The Assault - and the consequences
Summary: 3 Stars
One night in Holland, in 1945, towards the end of the war, a family is killed by the Nazis. Only the youngest son, Anton Steenwijk lives. The book follows the life of Anton over ensuing 35 years.
It's broken up into 5 episodes, several years apart, each of which sheds new perspective on the assault.(Specifically, in each episode Anton meets up with a different person associated with the attack - the son of a Nazi collaborator, a member of the resistance, a neighbor, etc.)
It's different. It's not so much of a thriller as an examination of how what happened in the war affected things long after the fact. The writing is clear and polished. It's a thoughtful consideration of how war impacts peoples lives.
That said, I give it about 3.5 stars. Good but not great. Mainly, I didn't *get* the main character Anton. The minor characters were better done. Anton seemed like an observer. I didn't get how he felt about anything. The details of his life were just sketched in. This made the book fall kind of flat for me, despite it's considerable virtues.
Book Review: The ambiguities of culpability
Summary: 4 Stars
I saw that Harry Mulisch died last Saturday (October 30th). That reminded me that I still had never read THE ASSAULT, which I bought more than 20 years ago. It turns out to be a powerful, though not great, novel about the random misfortunes of war and the ambiguities of culpability.
The protagonist is Anton Steenwijk. In 1945, when he is twelve and living in occupied Holland, a Nazi collaborator is shot and killed in front of the Steenwijks' next-door neighbors by communists associated with the Resistance. The neighbors, however, drag the body to the front of the Steenwijks' house. When the Germans discover it there, they include the Steenwijks in their massive reprisal. Only Anton survives. He grows up to be an anesthesiologist, trying to forget the past and shunning all politics. But chance encounters keep bringing him back to 1945, and over the next 35 years he gradually learns more and more about that fateful night.
The novel keeps raising the question, implicitly or explicitly, of who gets the blame for the Steenwijk family tragedy. Is it the Germans? Or is it the assassins, who knew that reprisals would ensue? Or is it the victim, the Nazi collaborator? Or is it the next-door neighbors who moved his body to the front of the Steenwijks' house? (And why did they move it to the house to their right, rather than the house on their left?) At one point one of the actors from the past whom Anton encounters waves aside all those questions: "Those are the kinds of truths that don't do us any good. The only truth that's useful is that everyone gets killed by whoever kills them, and by no one else."
Such questions of responsibility and culpability are further complicated when one considers Mulisch's biographical profile. His father, a German-Austrian, emigrated to Holland after WWI, where he met and married a young Jewish girl. Harry was born in 1927. As the Nazis descended on Western Europe, Harry's parents divorced and Harry's father went to work for the bank where Jews sent to concentration camps were forced to deposit their assets. His collaborationist position enabled him to pull strings and secure the release of Harry's mother when she was arrested by the Gestapo (though all of her blood relatives were murdered). Thus, Mulisch grew up with the conundrum that if his father had not been a Nazi collaborator, he and his mother would also have been victims of the Holocaust.
As the novel progresses from 1945 to 1952 and then to 1956, 1966, and 1981, WWII gradually recedes for Holland in general. But not for Anton Steenwijk, despite his fervent wishes. He ends up being haunted by history's random strokes of fate. "Whenever he thought about time, * * * he did not conceive of events as coming out of the future to move through the present into the past. Instead, they developed out of the past in the present on their way to an unknown future."
THE ASSAULT is not a superbly crafted novel. Among other literary defects, it is overwrought at times and on occasion the irony is overdone. But Mulisch seems to be more a novelist of ideas than a literary craftsman or stylist, and in THE ASSAULT he has fashioned a provocative and powerful tale.
Book Review: The assault on a German officer makes hell brake loose...
Summary: 4 Stars
This book should be read by everyone who is interested in the Second World War and the consequenses of this terrifying event. The main question is how to live with the memory of the horror of war; how to cope with people who were 'wrong' those days. Read this book and think about it. It's a must.