[The
above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside
thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant. I
welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this
video.]
This may be the most enjoyable experience reading fiction that I have had in the last year – and also one of the most profound and unexpected. My attention was piqued in June when I heard of Keilson’s death at the age of 101; I knew he was considered to be a good author, yet I never read him. Having long had a penchant for the bleak, searching quality of twentieth-century Dutch fiction, particularly Willem Frederik Hermans, Harry Mulisch, and Gerard Reve, I decided to read this.
However stunning Keilson’s novels are – and I hope to communicate that momentarily – he is even better known for other work. For many decades, he worked in child psychology and psychiatry, with an especial focus on children severely traumatized by World War II. His keen insight into human nature, thought processes, and motivation is on par with the world’s greatest novelists, and that is no hyperbole. As if his psychological and psychiatric training were not inducements enough to read his work, the horrors of the War were not pure theory for him. Both of his parents perished in Auschwitz.
The novel’s setting is 1930s Germany. We follow an unnamed narrator in childhood; we get hints of his precociousness and impishness through learning of both his penchant for forging stamps, and also through a sustained theory of the history of struggle that he presents and continuously develops throughout the novel. As a boy, he acquires a lifelong fascination with an adversary who is almost always unnamed, but sometimes goes by simply “B.” Some reviews have been only too eager to guess at the existence of “B,” seeing as how we are in 1930s Germany. However, I personally think Keilson might have a good reason for keeping the adversary anonymous; using one name would collapse the entire structure of the novel into a kind of singularity; keeping the adversary nameless (even though we still may continue to guess, and guess accurately), Keilson keeps the narrative at a level of constant psychological, humanistic portraiture, instead of the story of a single couple locked in interminable battle.
As the novel progresses and the narrator grows into manhood, we learn that he has a friend who is utterly taken with “B” and his ideas; another time, we see him spending an afternoon with a girl that he knows and fancies from his workplace whose friends turn out to be sympathetic to fascism, too. Instead of simplistic moralism, Keilson intelligently and deftly engages with the adversary on a human level, at one point realizing the nihilism inherent in the logic of “I want to kill him just as badly as he wants to kill me.”
Narratively speaking, Keilson’s biggest gift is to mix tone and message in such unique and telling ways. On hearing that a novel is set during World War II, one is almost preconditioned to expect the trials and tribulations of the oppressor against the oppressed and hiding in safe houses; it is assumed that we will root for the good, the just, the persecuted, and that evil, in the end, will be vanquished. Keilson presented us with nothing so sugar-coated. His efforts at characterization drive toward showing the similarities between himself and B, not the vast differences. He is not interested in showing you how morally superior he is (we already know that), but instead wants to show how existentially, a word applied perhaps too liberally to this novel, he and “B” are similarly situated.
Keilson’s search feels so liberating, instead of the moral burden that seem to come with reading so many novels of the Holocaust. As much as I have read Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, I found Keilson to be better than both of them. Unfortunately, he is not well known in the United States, but he should be. I should also add here that Ivo Jarosy’s translation from the German is luminous, especially in its ability to capture dialogue. I would recommend “The Death of the Adversary” for anyone in search of a great novel that, like all great novels, is more eager to share questions than answers.
However stunning Keilson’s novels are – and I hope to communicate that momentarily – he is even better known for other work. For many decades, he worked in child psychology and psychiatry, with an especial focus on children severely traumatized by World War II. His keen insight into human nature, thought processes, and motivation is on par with the world’s greatest novelists, and that is no hyperbole. As if his psychological and psychiatric training were not inducements enough to read his work, the horrors of the War were not pure theory for him. Both of his parents perished in Auschwitz.
The novel’s setting is 1930s Germany. We follow an unnamed narrator in childhood; we get hints of his precociousness and impishness through learning of both his penchant for forging stamps, and also through a sustained theory of the history of struggle that he presents and continuously develops throughout the novel. As a boy, he acquires a lifelong fascination with an adversary who is almost always unnamed, but sometimes goes by simply “B.” Some reviews have been only too eager to guess at the existence of “B,” seeing as how we are in 1930s Germany. However, I personally think Keilson might have a good reason for keeping the adversary anonymous; using one name would collapse the entire structure of the novel into a kind of singularity; keeping the adversary nameless (even though we still may continue to guess, and guess accurately), Keilson keeps the narrative at a level of constant psychological, humanistic portraiture, instead of the story of a single couple locked in interminable battle.
As the novel progresses and the narrator grows into manhood, we learn that he has a friend who is utterly taken with “B” and his ideas; another time, we see him spending an afternoon with a girl that he knows and fancies from his workplace whose friends turn out to be sympathetic to fascism, too. Instead of simplistic moralism, Keilson intelligently and deftly engages with the adversary on a human level, at one point realizing the nihilism inherent in the logic of “I want to kill him just as badly as he wants to kill me.”
Narratively speaking, Keilson’s biggest gift is to mix tone and message in such unique and telling ways. On hearing that a novel is set during World War II, one is almost preconditioned to expect the trials and tribulations of the oppressor against the oppressed and hiding in safe houses; it is assumed that we will root for the good, the just, the persecuted, and that evil, in the end, will be vanquished. Keilson presented us with nothing so sugar-coated. His efforts at characterization drive toward showing the similarities between himself and B, not the vast differences. He is not interested in showing you how morally superior he is (we already know that), but instead wants to show how existentially, a word applied perhaps too liberally to this novel, he and “B” are similarly situated.
Keilson’s search feels so liberating, instead of the moral burden that seem to come with reading so many novels of the Holocaust. As much as I have read Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, I found Keilson to be better than both of them. Unfortunately, he is not well known in the United States, but he should be. I should also add here that Ivo Jarosy’s translation from the German is luminous, especially in its ability to capture dialogue. I would recommend “The Death of the Adversary” for anyone in search of a great novel that, like all great novels, is more eager to share questions than answers.
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