It won’t surprise anyone who reads this remarkable Dutch novella, set among the bloody churn of partisans, Russians and retreating German forces towards the end of the second world war, that it has long been regarded as a classic in the Netherlands. In a sharp new translation, the first standalone English-language edition arrives more than half a century after the book first appeared in Dutch.
But be glad that it has finally emerged. It remains a shocking read, even if you have to imagine the impact it must have had when it was published in its home country in 1951, exploding the prevailing postwar discourse of brave resistance to the Nazi occupation with a story of selfish opportunism and amoral nihilism.
The narrator is a partisan – but not the romantic hero of legend. He is filthy, confused, frightened and fed up. When his ragged battalion strays into a spa town, he finds himself alone in a large, luxurious house, which seems to offer a reprieve from the horror around him: a chance to pretend that “the war had never really taken place”.
He has a bath, falls asleep and wakes up to find Nazis ringing the doorbell looking for a billet. In a brief, tense scene, he convinces the soldiers that he is the owner of the splendid house and so finds himself living alongside them, desperate to conceal his true identity, but equally unwilling to escape back into the maelstrom of war.
More commonplace books might use this situation to extract sympathy for a plucky young chancer getting one over on the enemy. Hermans doesn’t allow this comfort; instead, he blasts our expectations in a series of increasingly awful scenes. The narrator turns out to be just as foul as the Nazis, while maintaining a gallows humour and deadpan clarity that make him a disturbingly engaging presence. This is a brutal story that’s all the more shocking because it packs its ferocious series of punches into just 80 pages. It takes an hour or two to read, but An Untouched House is the kind of book that stays with you for ever.
• An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans, translated by David Colmer, is published by Pushkin. To order a copy for £6.79 (RRP £7.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
