Explore Das Attentat Created By Harry Mulisch Offered As Physical Edition

novel is constructed very simply,

It concerns an incident that occurs near Haarlem, in The Netherlands, during the Hunger Winter towards the end of WWII, The main character Anton Steenwyck, is a boy of twelve at the time of the incident,

The novel is divided into five episodes plus a prologue, The incident occurs in the first episode, Each subsequent episode takes place years after the original event and in each one Anton meets someone else who was involved with the incident and each meeting obliges the reader to reevaluate the event.


A theme might be the way that WWII away from the so to speak 'official' battlefields, was a set of civil wars, none of which resolved anything and which are still playing out in Europe to this day though not always as intensely or with as much bloodshed.


As a humble reader I wondered as I wandered how far we are meant to take the revelations as reliable given that Anton was as mentioned twelve at the time of the incident and the later revelations are made up to almost forty years later The first meeting is a mere seven years after the event, but that is already quite a while I think for fallible human memory and our biased, powerfully inventive intelligencesbut maybe my wandering wonderings are not relevant to the author's intentions.
I was slightly suspicious too that a former neighbour recognised him without hesitation forty years later,

The style of writing seemed to me to be simple, appropriate to the thought of a twelve year old, but this struck me as inappropriate in the later episodes when Anton was a university student until eventually the style felt about right again.
But then again the author is outsourcing complexity to the reader, The reader has to reappraise the original incident Who was right and who was wrong, or were they all victims of circumstance attempting to do the right thing according to their ideals

I enjoyed that Anton becomes an anaesthetist, while each episode is about the rediscovery of his personal pain.
This gives the novel the dynamic of an ancient Greek tragedy once the questions start to asked There is no wayout other than to go through pain, Perhaps though anaesthesia is not about escaping pain but managing it, The adult, and hopefully the reader will see things differently than the twelve year old, النهار بازغ في كل مكان لكن الليل جاثم هنا. كلا إنه أكثر من ليل "
أنه ليل لا ينتهي ماضي لا يريد أن يفارقك. . وجع مش قادر تنساه و جرح سايب علامة في قلبك مش حتقدر تتعالج منه مهما حاولت. .
إنها الحرب. . و ما أبشعها في كل وقت و كل مكان. .

تبدأ أحداث الرواية في هولندا عام ١٩٤٥ في أواخر الحرب العالمية الثانية بعد أن قامت أفراد من المقاومة بقتل شرطي عميل للألمان و انتهي الحال بجثته أمام منزل لعائلة هولندية لا علاقة لها بما حدث و لكن حياتهم ستنقلب رأسا علي عقب بعد هذه الليلة خصوصا مع بطل الرواية أنطون الذي كان يبلغ من العمر ١٢ عاما عندما حدث الأعتداء علي أهله وعلي منزله

الرواية مش عن الحرب وتفاصيلها و لكن عن الحرب و تأثيرها علي من عاشوها و إزاي بتقدر تكسرك حتي لو لسة واقف علي رجلك. .
الرواية مكتوبة بإتقان غير عادي و حتلاقي نفسك مع الانتهاء من كل جزء منها بتعرف جزء جديد من تفاصيل الاعتداء و مش حتعرف الصورة الكاملة إلا في الصفحات الأخيرة للرواية مما جعل العمل مشوق جدا في قراءته و علي الرغم إن الكتاب ٣٠٠ صفحة بس هو من الكتب اللي مستحيل تسيبه إلا لما تخلصه. .

عبقرية الكتاب في تفاصيله وفي النتيجة اللي حتوصلها بعد الإنتهاء منه وحتعرف إن مش لازم الشخص المذنب من وجهة نظرك يكون فعلا مذنب. . ممكن يكون له أسباب ودوافع تانية أنت مقدرتش تشوفها أو تفهمها

"هل الجميع مذنب وغير مذنب هل الذنب
بريء والبراءة مذنبة"

يعيب الرواية إن في بعض التفاصيل في حياة أنطون لم ترسم بعناية بجانب إن كان في جزء فيه كلام عن الأحزاب الهولندية غير مفهوم شوية وحسيته ملوش لازمة ولذلك نزلت التقييم من ٥ إلي ٤ نجوم, . .

رواية عبقرية. . سرد ممتع. . ترجمة رائعة
ينصح بها وجدا كمان All of us, I think, even if we don't have a deeply profound sense of the bittersweetness of life, carry something inside us that haunts us, and we carry those things and react to their presence according to our ability to process and place them into a healthy context though sometimes it is hard to quite know whether "healthy" is something genuine, arbitrary or just an artificial coping strategy.
These lingering demons can include great regrets, an embarrassment or moment of public humiliation, or a lost love, We bear up stoically and move ahead even as these saddening passengers continue to take the ride with us, reminding us at intervals of varying duration that they are still here, and likely always will be, thank you very much.
And we probably think that these demons are so awful that no one else can possibly understand them, or, consequently, us, Most of our demons, though, are gardenvariety, There are plenty of other people, we tend to forget, who have gone through much much worse, Far worse. What they carry inside them, we can't quite imagine,

In Harry Mulisch's deceptively laconic, and sometimes diffident novel, The Assault, Amsterdam is peopled with those carrying such demons, It is a generational graveyard of walking skeletons, those trying to build a sane future in the ruins of an urban charnel house in which the ghosts of World War II, even if they are not literal ones, float and exist in memory and pass before the eyes of the haunted as surely as the very real city itself a city that is everchanging yet which can never change enough to ever let its phantoms fade.


It would seem that the story of Anton, ayearold boy whose parents and brother are taken from him in a cruel twist of fate at the very end of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in, is a minor tragedy, as tragedies go in the grand scheme of a total war.
It is a brief episode, barely a squeak in the din of the collective scream,

But it's an event that involves many, as it happens, as all wars do, and it leaves behind a network of closely and distantly related people, all working at crosspurposes in a world where survival begets it own imperatives and consequences that reverberate for the rest of people's lives.


In this sweeping tale, everyone has his or her own story regardless of the commonality of the war experience and those disparate pieces of the puzzle are held by many.
And Mulisch takes his time assembling the picture for us, bringing out the puzzle pieces only as Anton finds them, Anton, like so many war victims, has decided to suppress his memories, to not pursue the truth about the fate of his family, to err on the side of starting over, acting as if his first life was just a distant fairy tale.
Others, however, carry the war like an open wound, such as the resistance fighter, Cor Takes, a man who played a key role in the chain of events that affected the fate of Anton's family.
When Anton meets Takes, years after the war, almost by sheer chance, the pieces of the puzzle suddenly emerge, and are presented to him almost against his will, While Anton has ignored his memory and favored disinterest, Takes has done the opposite, For him, the war never ended he lives with it, bitterly and passionately every day, stoking a hatred that never dies and informs his life in the present, constantly.
As Anton says to him, sarcastically and without sympathy, "The War is still on right, Takes"

As the story proceeds, haunting, blunted memories become sharpened again, and connections begin to form.
All the things that Anton did not want to know become known, And despite his own suppression of memory, his thinking patterns and emotions are informed by the war, His own wife, Saskia, becomes a surrogate for a woman he never saw, a prisoner who comforted him in the murky blackness of a prison cell on his darkest night of the war in.
Her spectre, one that preoccupies Takes particularly as well, provides the story a powerful sense of the irrational and the romantic and the need to find an anchor in the midst of chaos within the context of love.


The book movies along very slowly, taking Anton through decades of his life as he attains success and all its desired domestic and public trappings, Along the way there are lovely passages as he reflects on disparate issues and seemingly unrelated features of his world, In some ways, the book seems to skate too easily over a vast span of time as it intermixes past and present, Fortunately, it never panders to easy sentimentality even as we crave some emotional catharsis, Its revelations about the war are slow to emerge, This is to Mulisch's credit, because he saves the big guns for the end,

The book explores many heavy issues without lingering too long over them, giving us just enough to ponder them on our own, Memory, our perception of time, and the twists of fate that can occur so cruelly if only for other factors being otherwise, are deftly touched on, So is the nature of morality in wartime, The notion of fighting evil with evil is well examined, and the book raises interesting moral questions about collateral damage, acceptable civilian casualties/losses for a greater cause, and the sacrifice of the innocent.
These are notions that continue to inform our geopolitical challenges today,

At times, the book has the feeling of a Graham Greene novel, with slight noirish thriller elements its moral ambiguities and shadowy characters seem like something out of The Third Man and any number of Greene books in which time and circumstance have left its protagonists rootless and desperately seeking rootedness in an unforgiving universe.
The book evokes the helplessness of people caught up in events too big for them, in which the only response is to hunker down and wait things out, hoping the devil passes your door until the clock runs out.
It also reminds us that what we see, what we think and what we know may have nothing to do with the truth,

For most of the way, I have to admit I was not quite sure what I felt about this book, and for a long time I kept it at an emotional arm's length.
It seemed like it did not want me in its personal space, The protagonist's disinterest became my own,

But it all serves a grand purpose, and Mulisch's calculating dolings come in speedier succession, capped with a rapid series in the final pages that demystify the story while mystifying its overall meaning.


The final revelation, which comes in the last three pages, hit me with the force of a bludgeon, and it was so shattering that it left me literally holding my hand over my mouth as tears burst forth.


There is much more that can be said about this book, Its examination of memory, of the true character and motivations of people, and of the way things circle back on themselves deserve more comment than I can pithily expound on here.


The book is poetic, beautifully written, and thoughtful, And those who stick it out will be rewarded with a finale of tremendous power one that finds light and hope from the darkest of times,

KRKY
.