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In De Ban Van De Tegenstander (1959)

by Hans Keilson(Favorite Author)

3.59 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

9055159883 (ISBN13: 9789055159888)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Uitgeverij Van Gennep

review 1: An unnamed narrator gives us his thoughts on his adversary, B. It is safe to say that B is Hitler and the narrator Jewish.This is a novel in that a story is told, there are characters and we have dialogue. There are also events. For example, one character describes in some detail what is plainly an act of desecration of a Jewish cemetery. And on another occasion, B arrives at the same hotel the narrator is staying in and gives a speech which the narrator hears at one remove via a loudspeaker in the lounge.This last incident gives Keilson an opportunity to analyse Hitler’s public speaking technique, which he duly does because this book is a piece of analysis in the guise of a novel. Listening to this speech, details of which we are not given, our narrator comes to an impo... morertant conclusion. Why does B hate him and his like so much? Because B does not know who B is, and must create an enemy so that he will know who he is not.To understand what is going on in this book, we only need to look at a passage like the following. It is taken from a conversation between two young shop assistants, one of whom is the narrator. How many shop assistants do we hear talking like this? ‘No,’ he said, ‘not hate him, but that your pride forbade you to identify yourself with him to such an extent that you almost forgot what you are and who he is. That is the essential nature of sympathy. But perhaps you are afraid of impoverishing yourself by submitting to limitations?’ (P74) The author is well aware of what he is doing, so well aware that he takes out insurance policies against alienating or boring the reader. The following is one example. There is another in the concluding pages.‘I can see plainly that I am not taking those technical pains which authors have to take in order to make their stories appear important and fascinating at any cost, since otherwise no one will read them. For them the corrections are everything. I am in the happy position of not having to bother my head about the claims of entertainment or accusations of boredom.’(P124)Well, I was bored and the author wasn’t bothered. It is possible to include philosophical musings in a novel. Robert Musil did it to good effect in ‘The Man Without Qualities’, but Musil was a novelist first, a philosopher second. Keilson is a philosopher first. Or perhaps we should say ‘analyst’, knowing the nature of his interest in states of mind. An interesting book but not a good novel.
review 2: Hans Keilson’s The Death of the Adversary is an odd little portrait of a nameless young man tracking an unnamed “adversary” whom he watches rise to power in an unnamed country in the 1930s. Keilson – a German Jew – wrote the book while in hiding in the Netherlands during World War Two. Interestingly, the novel itself has been lauded as a ‘lost’ masterpiece in the last few years. Now, I shall be frank and confess that although I think that the book is a really interesting piece of history, as a literary work it seems a little uneven to me. Perhaps it is a deliberate narrative device, but the jarring (and repetitive) series of notes ruminating on the rise of Hitler, his motives, personality, as well as the nature and causes of the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism is clumsy and wooden (perhaps this might be a poor translation) and worst of all: intensely dull. I wouldn’t bother if I were you. less

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