{"id":4785,"date":"2010-11-18T00:21:04","date_gmt":"2010-11-18T04:21:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=4785"},"modified":"2016-06-26T13:31:43","modified_gmt":"2016-06-26T17:31:43","slug":"harry-mulisch-the-assault","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2010\/11\/18\/harry-mulisch-the-assault\/","title":{"rendered":"Harry Mulisch: The Assault<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Assault<\/strong><\/em><\/span>\r\nby Harry Mulisch (De Aanslag<\/em>, 1982)\r\ntranslated from the Dutch by Claire Nicolas White (1985)<\/span>\r\nPantheon (1986)<\/span>\r\n285 pp<\/span><\/pre>\n
When Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize earlier this year, M.A. Orthofor at The Complete Review’s Literary Saloon said that, while he can see a strong case for Vargas Llosa, he thought Amos Oz or Harry Mulisch were the more deserving<\/a>. I hadn’t read either and, a few days later, hoping to get a jump on next year’s Nobel winner, I went and bought Harry Mulisch’s\u00a0The Assault<\/em>. Sadly, when I returned from the book store, I found out that Mulisch had died that day and will never be a Nobel laureate.\u00a0I still haven’t read any Vargas Llosa (have a few in hand, though), but I can certainly see why Mulisch would be a strong candidate based on this book alone, and it is not even considered his masterpiece.<\/p>\n
\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n
The book starts out softly, almost\u00a0with a comforting air of nostalgia,\u00a0by describing a row of four houses, all with homey names.\u00a0Twelve-year-old Anton Steenwijk\u00a0has grown up\u00a0on this street, getting to know the neighbors, some of whom are more friendly than others.\u00a0It obviously\u00a0hard living, but in this prologue we\u00a0feel there\u00a0is friendship.\u00a0However, the year is 1945. Any warmth or coziness we feel from the scene is\u00a0subverted\u00a0by our growing knowledge of the true state of these homes.<\/p>\n
It was January, nineteen forty-five.\u00a0Almost all of Europe had been liberated and was once more rejoicing, eating, drinking, making love, and beginning to forget the War. But every day in Haarlem looked more like one of those spent gray clinkers that they used to take out of the stove, when there had still been coal to burn.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It is frigid outside, and everyone is starving.\u00a0Peter, Anton’s seventeen-year-old brother hasn’t been out of the house for months, not even\u00a0for school, because they are afraid he will be conscripted.<\/p>\n
On that January night,\u00a0Anton, Peter and their mother and father\u00a0move to the back of the house to play a game as it gets dark outside. It’s a wonderfully rendered scene, and there’s some hope in the air due to the simple fact that the family is together engaging in a pastime.\u00a0Suddenly they hear gunshots outside. Peter, to the horror of his parents,\u00a0runs to the window and discovers that there is a body lying in the street in front of their neighbor’s home, neighbors the Steenwijks are quite friendly with.\u00a0The Steenwijks, still contemplating the\u00a0tragedy that an assassination could bring to the street,\u00a0are shocked when\u00a0their neighbors\u00a0run outside and move the body from their part of the street to the front of the Steenwijk’s home.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0German soldiers have been known to retaliate quickly and fiercely, and the fact that the body is in front of the Steenwijk’s home is probably going to be excuse enough for them to burn the home to the ground. Petrified, the Steenwijk parents watch as their oldest son Peter runs into the street to try to drag the body again. It turns out that the dead man is Chief Inspector Fake Ploeg, known as a violent Nazi collaborator.\u00a0Unfortunately, before Peter can do anything, the Germans arrive.\u00a0Peter\u00a0runs through a fence. Anton looks on in shock as the Germans bully his parents.\u00a0In the\u00a0confusion, Anton is ushered outside and into a police car, where, eventually, he watches his\u00a0house burn down, leaving a gap in that line of four homes.<\/p>\n
The police\u00a0send Anton to\u00a0stay with his uncle and aunt while they figure out what to do. No one knows what has happened to Peter or Anton’s parents, but the war doesn’t last much longer. A few months later, when the war has ended, Anton finds out that his entire family was killed that January night.<\/p>\n
The book jumps to 1952, and says:<\/p>\n
All the rest is a postscript — the cloud of ash that rises into the stratosphere from the volcano, circles around the earth, and continues to rain down on all its continents for years.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It may be postscript, but we still have quite a large chunk of the book left. Through it Anton attempts to forget that night and the war and just move on. He goes to a middling school and becomes a middling doctor, specializing in anesthesiology. Through the years (the book moves from 1952 to 1956, 1966, and finally 1981), Anton grows older, that night becomes more and more unbelievable but is always vivid, despite his best wishes:<\/p>\n
Boundaries have to be continuously sealed off, but it’s a hopeless job, for everything touches everything else in this world. A beginning never disappears, not even with the ending.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The book doesn’t just track Anton’s life, though.\u00a0Through chance encounters with others involved in that fateful night, Anton learns some of the motives behind the actions, but this, strangely, only makes issues of guilt and innocence murkier. This is a fantastic book about chance and fate, about guilt and innocence, all against the backdrop of the twentieth century as the big issues range from World War II to Budapest to nuclear weapon talks in the 1980s. For all its scope, it remains intimate, just like that opening section when we looked on the four homes lined up in a row.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Trevor reviews Harry Mulisch’s The Assault<\/em>. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4786,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[800,216],"tags":[878,935,607],"coauthors":[505],"class_list":["post-4785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-harry-mulisch","tag-1980s","tag-935","tag-dutch"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/The-Assault.jpg?fit=345%2C530&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-1fb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4785"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4785\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18879,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4785\/revisions\/18879"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4785"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}