“[Willem Frederik Hermans's] world is bleak, plain and murderous, and sometimes hilarious, which is an unsettling kind of genius.” --Michael Pye, author of Antwerp

"Influenced by Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, [Willem Frederik Hermans] produced some of literature’s most profound reflections on the second world war."--Dalya Alberge, The Guardian

"With its hapless protagonist, acerbic tone, and laughable rumors of war (including German paratroopers disguised as nuns), much of this newly translated 1971 novel by the late Hermans is a comedy of errors. But its scenes of destruction are shattering and surreal . . . A sly but scorching Dutch masterpiece."
-- Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Hermans interweaves a bitter, occasionally darkly comic moral fable with an unforgettable account of the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, first published in 1971 and seamlessly translated by Colmer. . . . [A Guardian Angel Recalls] should establish Hermans as a modern Dostoyevsky."
--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Underrated: the Dutch writer Willem Frederik Hermans, especially his novel An Untouched House." -- Ian McEwan, Times Literary Supplement

"Hermans is one of Holland's great 20th-century writers." --David Mills, The Times


Praise for An Untouched House


  "It takes an hour or two to read, but An Untouched House is the kind of book that stays with you forever." --Sam Jordison, The Guardian

 "A slim but potent war story . . . Hermans doesn't deliver an explicit moral judgement on the narrator... but the thundering violence of the closing pages sends its own message. Fire, a suicide attempt, torture, and hanging are all shadowed by men killing with a cynical, mocking cruelty, stressing Hermans's point that dreams of peace can easily become entangled in violence. A dark wartime vision that evokes Koestler, Orwell, and Vonnegut." --Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Although An Untouched House is brief, it is worth pacing oneself and absorbing its remarkable density. Hermans is the architect of a masterful story - concise but expansive in vision... a lucid, exhilarating account." --Peyton Harvey, Zyzzyva

 "As disturbing and powerful as anything by Joseph Heller or Kurt Vonnegut." --Michael Faber, The Guardian

"An Untouched House is a small but unforgettable story about the schizophrenia of war. W.F. Hermans's writing is implacably precise, always searching for truth, evocative but austere, and thoroughly addictive. Reader be warned: after An Untouched House you will want to read everything this great European author wrote!" --Peter Terrin

"It is a novel of desperate survival. But the sensation it transmits is not desperation; rather, the entirety of it, even the horrific scenes of death and torture, feels like a nightmarish dream through which both the reader and the characters wander, without much choice and absolved of all morality... It is perhaps this very immediacy, the apparent inexistence of anything beyond the present moment, which makes Hermans's novella not only bearable, but utterly immersive." --Juan E. Suarez, Meridian

"The most unsettling book I've read this year, An Untouched House proves the horror and inhumanity of the twentieth century just that: unsettled. Hermans' pithy masterpiece is a warning." --Hal Hlavinka, Community Bookstore  

"In An Untouched House, a disillusioned WWII partisan soldier deserts and finds an abandoned house where he decides to stay. What unfolds is a strange and taut psychological tale of how individuals might choose to ignore the horrors of the outside world until they inevitably come crashing down around them. Ending in an explosion of violence that illuminates the true savagery of the human heart, this little stick of dynamite is less than 100 pages and damn near perfect." --Keaton Patterson, Brazos Bookstore

"Crackling with uneasy tension . . . A beautiful new edition of a powerful and timeless, slim Dutch masterpiece, written in a spare and crisp style that brings to mind Camus." --The Lady

"Profoundly unsettling . . . haunts the mind for long afterwards." -- The Sunday Times, A Book of the Year

 "Those who do simply open and read will find themselves immersed in a nightmare miniature where philosophical musing gives seamless way to beautiful but unyielding cruelty...this newer translation by David Colmer seems to better capture the unsettling horror." -- Ben Murphy, Full Stop

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