Horrors of war depicted with cold realism, brutal honesty and deceptive emotional detachment. An Untouched House was published in 1950 so memories of Horrors of war depicted with cold realism, brutal honesty and deceptive emotional detachment. An Untouched House was published in 1950 so memories of real hecatomb must have been vivid and it feels. The scope of this novella is wider and more universal though — truth be told, the events narrated by the unnamed soldier could have happened and still can happen anywhere, anytime, during any armed conflict. The vagueness of geographical location and the namelessness of the protagonist serve the purpose well.
I definitely subscribe to Willem Frederik Hermans’s point of view on the devastating effects of war but found the graphic violence in this book overwhelming. The author's writing style is impressive: his succinct sentences with basic vocabulary reflect the way war influences how people think, feel (or rather do not feel) and act, deprived of rudimentary values and human emotions. There is such a contrast between the narrator’s matter-of-fact tone and the grisly and sickening things happening in this novella. Even the title of the book is a good example of Willem Frederik Hermans’s draining irony.
I admire the literary quality of An Untouched House and the author's deftness but feel squashed by his profound pessimism and hope to forget some nightmarish scenes as soon as possible. Reading this novella was like wading in icy, depressing bleakness.
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