Death of the Adversary: A Novel by Hans Keilson
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)
Francine Prose wrote a compelling review back in August in the New York Times Book Review about two novels by the author Hans Keilson. His two books and Death of the Adversary and Comedy in a Minor Key were written about life prior to and during WWII and received accolades in 1959 when Death of the Adversary was published.
Translated into English in 1962 (Orion Press, NY) and first published in 2010 for the American public, Death of the Adversary is a psychological tour de force. Death is the story of a young boy growing up in the 1930s, a young boy uncannily sensitive to the psychological, political, cultural, personal atmosphere looming about him.
He is particularly aware of an unseen force, or rather menace, whose sting he intuits in conversations between his loving mother and father and later in schoolmates and friends. He tries to understand the fear growing around him, tries to integrate it into his worldview with rationalizations inept to the ever consuming power of the threat. The threat is real and it is unnamed in the book. Some of his friends speak of a presence they admire and ultimately proffer their allegiance and souls. We realize the threat is Hitler and Nazism.
So how does a young boy or anyone for that matter digest the ambivalence emanating from his German/Danish culture and come to terms with something that steals his early hope for stability and security to prosper and flourish, that steals hope itself? This is a “psychological fable (see blurb on back of paperback) of enormous proportions showing how the mind can’t see beyond it own limitations, its own experience but at a much deeper, non-thinking level feel the agonizing, irreconcilable horror of something so evil as unknown or unknowable, admired by despised.
Who can better write of such things than this author who became a psychoanalyst treating children traumatized by war? Not only an an articulate author and psycholanalyst, Keilson was hidden during WWII and eventually became a member of the Dutch resistance. The questions he eloquently asks in this book would make a lively discussion for a book group. Many WWII books have been published recently and this should be one of the first we read. Then I would suggest Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas, The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, and Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand.
Read more about Bonhoeffer here and The Invisible Bridge here.
-Pat
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