Harry Mulisch has died at the age of 83 on the 30th of October 2010. It was only last year that I was introduced to this celebrated Dutch author when I read The Assault (De Aanslag). It is a beautiful and complex story set in WWII, a period Mulisch often revisited in his novels. De Aanslag, very much like Bernard Schlink's The Reader, highlights the ethical grey areas of war. It is a perfectly scripted crime puzzle of a young Dutch boy who witnesses the demise of his whole family by the hand of the Germans. The family is mistakenly believed to be responsible for the shooting of a much hated Dutch fascists/German informer. The boy survives and grows up to become an anaesthetist later in life but it is rather he who in turn becomes numbed by this traumatic event from his childhood and throughout his life becomes indifferent towards the mystery of why it was his family that had to pay the unfair price, but the answers come to find him and seek him out through life events and the solution to the puzzle is most riveting and unexpected. I loved every second of this book and the end haunted me for months. I walked with the answer and I felt incomplete with its resolve, not from a literary perspective but from an inherent human one who seeks justifiable black and-white finger pointing answers. It is a novel so rich in perspective and as with the Dutch language, beautifully descriptive and I wish I had been introduced to Mulisch sooner. De Aanslag was made into a movie which won best foreign film award at both the Golden Globes and Oscars. Mulisch was also thought by many to be a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. His book The Discovery of Heaven (De ontdekking van de Hemel) was named Best Dutch Book Ever in 2007.
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