![]() Extending these thoughts, he relates the horrors that inevitably engulf the house methodically and dispassionately. "Imagine somebody who doesn't have a memory, who can't think of anything beyond what he sees, hears and feels," he says. Settling into it as though it were his own, he contends over several days with billeting Nazi soldiers, the surprise arrival of the house's true owners, and an eccentric resident in one of its mysteriously locked rooms. Set in an unspecified locale toward the end of WWII, it is narrated by an unnamed spy, fighting with the Allies, who chances upon an abandoned house not yet ravaged by battle. ![]() The cruelty and absurdity of war shapes the events of Hermans's devastating novella, first published in Dutch in 1951. ![]()
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