Welcome to Litsy!

My #BookSpin and #DoubleSpin for April are an unlikely pair: in the one hand a literary novella about desperate lives in wartime, translated from Dutch; on the other, urban fantasy featuring demigods and shapeshifters and vampires and who knows what all else.

Looking forward to both of course. Thanks @TheAromaofBooks

In the last months of WWII a partisan enters an abandoned villa in a luxury seaside resort, somewhere in Central Europe. Initially it is a peaceful place to stay. When a German regiment arrives for quartering, he pretends he is the owner of the house and leaves the ground floor to the Germans. Then the real owner returns unexpectedly.

This is a novella of a deceptive simplicity, behind which lies a particularly complex constructed story.

Told in the singular voice of a Dutch partisan who‘s fed up with the chaos of war and having no control over his life, this novella is one of the best depictions I‘ve read concerning the senselessness of war and how it can deform human minds. Clear, unsentimental prose #translated by David Colmer. #BlameitonLitsy or else BookTube.
(Image from the Archipelago edition cover is by Rene Magritte.)

“Culture gives no quarter! Extraordinary circumstances are only an excuse! Someone who gives in to extraordinary circumstances, nah! He is simply no longer a person of culture!”
I said nothing.
“In the last war the British barrage began one morning at 6:15. At 6:30 I began shaving. It was too dark in the trench, so I moved to higher ground. That cost me half my little finger. But at 7:30 I was sitting down to eat breakfast!”

Set during World War ll, this fever dream of a plotless novella has a Soviet Partisan soldier chancing upon an abandoned house. As the Nazis suddenly appear in his temporary sanctuary, he pretends to be the owner of the house—and the real owner shows up. The prose is beautiful in this Dutch classic, with startling moments of insight & imagery. The trauma of war, nihilism, & futility of the human condition makes it a tough & bleak read. #netgalley