It is the winter of 1945, the last dark days of World War II in occupied Holland. A Nazi collaborator, infamous for his cruelty, is assassinated as he rides home on his bicycle. The Germans retaliate by burning down the home of an innocent family; only twelve-year-old Anton survives.
Based on actual events, 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, 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.
Based on actual events, 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, 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.
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Publisher:
New York : Pantheon Books, 1985.
ISBN:
9780394744209
0394744209
9780394542454
0394542452
0394744209
9780394542454
0394542452
Branch Call Number:
LPLB851015194609
Characteristics:
183 p. ;,22 cm.
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Add a CommentActions, no matter how much they may be/seem to be necessary to the perpertrator, often have terrible consequences for others that may outweigh the anticipated benefits.
Brilliant long novella, spare but evocative, driven along by a wartime assault whose circumstances gradually and laconically unravel over a lifetime.
xx Mulisch, who died in 2010, has long been regarded as the Netherlands' greatest postwar novelist. With the narrative sureness of Graham Greene and the plausibility of a William Trevor plot, his special area (resulting from his own, very troubling parentage) is the tensions between collaboration and resistance during the Hitler War. xx Going on this short novel, he's an author well worth exploring.