The Assault

(Paperback, Main)

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With an introduction by Thomas HardingDuring the winter of 1945, the last dark days of World War II stretch out in occupied Holland as the populace wait for the Allies to arrive. A Dutch Nazi collaborator, Fake Ploeg, infamous for his cruelty, is assassinated as he rides home on his bicycle. His body is moved from one family's doorstep to another along the same road and the remaining Germans retaliate by burning down the final house and killing its inhabitants. Only their twelve-year-old son Anton survives.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 as an anaesthesiologist, 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.Powerful in its emotional restraint, lucid on the hardest of moral questions and fiercely moving, The Assault is an excavation of Dutch collaboration, resistance and the terrible collateral damage wrought on innocent people in times of war

Reviews

'Harry Mulisch belongs to the first rank of Dutch novelists of his generation' - J. M. Coetzee, Nobel Laureate and two-time Booker Prize winner

'Mulisch is a rarity ... an instinctively psychological novelist' - John Updike, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest

'Artful in its study of postponed knowledge and nightmare' - Kirkus reviews

Author Bio

Harry Kurt Victor Mulisch (1927-2010) was a Dutch writer. He wrote more than 80 novels, plays, essays, poems, and philosophical reflections. Mulisch's works have been translated into 38 languages so far. Along with Willem Frederik Hermans and Gerard Reve, Mulisch is considered one of the "Great Three" of Dutch post-war literature.