Book Description
Alberegt, a public prosecutor and self-proclaimed “man of minor failings,” speeds through Hook of Holland in his black Renault on May 9, 1940. His every move is guided by the cool and patient hand of a guardian angel. Flitting about from the hood of Alberegt’s car to the rim of his windswept hat, the angel attempts to quell their unhappy ward’s fears and secrets. (On occasion the heavenly narrator is so ashamed of Alberegt that they cover their own face with guardian wings.) The angel, musing for just a moment on the greater suffering of mankind, forgets a frenzied and lovelorn Alberegt at the wheel and Alberegt swerves into a small child crossing the road. This fatal event, on the eve of Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, spins the novel into a nightmare in which even expressions of empathy and humanity are edged out by cynicism and cruelty. Reminiscent of Georges Simenon, Albert Camus, and Kurt Vonnegut, A Guardian Angel Recalls is a brilliant and unnerving masterpiece.
Hermans is one of Holland’s great 20th-century writers.— David Mills, The Times
Praise for An Untouched House—
It takes an hour or two to read, but An Untouched House is the kind of book that stays with you forever.— Sam Jordison, The Guardian
A slim but potent war story. . . Hermans doesn’t deliver an explicit moral judgement on the narrator... but the thundering violence of the closing pages sends its own message. Fire, a suicide attempt, torture, and hanging are all shadowed by men killing with a cynical, mocking cruelty, stressing Hermans’s point that dreams of peace can easily become entangled in violence. A dark wartime vision that evokes Koestler, Orwell, and Vonnegut.— Kirkus Reviews, Starred
Although An Untouched House is brief, it is worth pacing oneself and absorbing its remarkable density. Hermans is the architect of a masterful story – concise but expansive in vision... a lucid, exhilarating account.— Peyton Harvey, Zyzzyva
An Untouched House is a small but unforgettable story about the schizophrenia of war. W.F. Hermans’s writing is implacably precise, always searching for truth, evocative but austere, and thoroughly addictive. Reader be warned: after An Untouched House you will want to read everything this great European author wrote.— Peter Terrin
It is a novel of desperate survival. But the sensation it transmits is not desperation; rather, the entirety of it, even the horrific scenes of death and torture, feels like a nightmarish dream through which both the reader and the characters wander, without much choice and absolved of all morality... It is perhaps this very immediacy, the apparent inexistence of anything beyond the present moment, which makes Hermans’s novella not only bearable, but utterly immersive.— Juan E. Suarez, Meridian
In An Untouched House, a disillusioned WWII partisan soldier deserts and finds an abandoned house where he decides to stay. What unfolds is a strange and taut psychological tale of how individuals might choose to ignore the horrors of the outside world until they inevitably come crashing down around them. Ending in an explosion of violence that illuminates the true savagery of the human heart, this little stick of dynamite is less than 100 pages and damn near perfect.— Keaton Patterson, Brazos Bookstore
The most unsettling book I’ve read this year, An Untouched House proves the horror and inhumanity of the twentieth century is just that: unsettled. Hermans’s pithy masterpiece is a warning.— Hal Hlavinka
As disturbing and powerful as anything by Joseph Heller or Kurt Vonnegut.— Michael Faber, The Guardian
Underrated: the Dutch writer Willem Frederik Hermans, especially his novel An Untouched House.— Ian McEwan, The Times Literary Supplement
Crackling with uneasy tension . . . A beautiful new edition of a powerful and timeless, slim Dutch masterpiece, written in a spare and crisp style that brings to mind Camus.— The Lady
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