Jonas Thente benämner Harry Mulischs verk som "svart och lättläst" i Dagens Nyheter. "Inkarnationen av 1900-talets fasor har tystnat." Läs mer på www.dn.se
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'And in the evenings piano music sounded through the open window. The room was lit up then; a very soft pink light. I always stopped and listened, for hours. Until the music abruptly ended and the light went out.’ (‘The Room’, 1947) |
Det holländska förlaget De Bezige Bij skriver om Harry Mulisch:
On behalf of his family and with great sorrow we announce that the writer Harry Mulisch died yesterday evening, Saturday 30 October 2010. He was 83 years old. Surrounded by his family, he passed away at his home on the Leidsekade in Amsterdam from the effects of cancer. With his death the Netherlands has lost one of its greatest literary sons.
Harry Mulisch leaves an unparalleled and inimitable oeuvre, a literary universe of great significance and virtuoso imaginative power. He wrote novels, novellas, stories, essayistic prose, studies, autobiographical accounts, reportage, plays and poetry.
Harry Mulisch was one of the most successful, most read and admired authors of his generation. He was the last remaining member of the illustrious Great Three of post-war Dutch literature. Mulisch’s work has been translated into dozens of languages and showered with praise by eminent literary critics at home and abroad. He was awarded all the most important literary prizes in the Netherlands, including the P.C. Hooft Prize and the Dutch Literature Prize.
For almost sixty years Harry Mulisch belonged to the very heart of De Bezige Bij. His death affects us deeply, plunging our publishing house into deep mourning.
‘I didn’t so much “experience” the war, I am the Second World War.’ So runs one particularly unforgettable pronouncement by Harry Kurt Victor Mulisch (1927), son of a Jewish mother from an Austrian banking family and an Austro-Hungarian father who served as an officer in the German army in the First World War. The Second World War is a theme running through all his literary work, from his breakthrough novel The Stone Bridal Bed, about the bombing of Dresden, right through to his last novel Siegfried, in which he invents a secret son to Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. He was always preoccupied by such subjects as guilt and innocence, right and wrong, and the shadowy territory that lies between.
Mulisch wrote his first story, ‘The Room’, in 1946 and it was published a year later in the magazine Elseviers Weekblad. In 1951 his first novel appeared, Archibald Strohalm, for which he was awarded the Reina Prinsen Geerlings Prize. This book, in which young Archibald fails pitifully in his efforts to create an all-embracing philosophy, was the first in a series of novels, novellas and plays that derive their power from a masterful balance between mythological, magical and psychological motifs. After The Stone Bridal Bed (1959) Mulisch’s attentions turned increasingly towards personal and social engagement. In 1961 he wrote Food for Psychologists, a collection of autobiographical essays, in 1962 Criminal Case 40/61 about the trial of Adolf Eichmann and in 1966 Report to the King Rat, about the Provo riots in Amsterdam.
In the 1970s Mulisch returned to writing novels. Two Women (1975) and the novella Old Air (1977) are examples of apparently crystal-clear storytelling behind which lurks a complex network of mythological references. In 1980 he produced his great philosophical study The Composition of the World. His greatest popular success was The Assault of 1982, a brilliant novel about an attack on a member of the NSB (the Dutch Nazi party) and its consequences for a family in the Dutch town of Haarlem, which sold over a million copies worldwide.
Mulisch’s magnum opus, The Discovery of Heaven, appeared in 1992, the year he turned 65. Unanimously hailed by the critics as a masterpiece, it brought together all the themes Mulisch had incorporated into his work over the decades. The novel was an unprecedented success abroad as well as in the Netherlands, where in 2007 it was chosen as the Best Dutch Book of All Time. The film of the novel, also called The Discovery of Heaven, was released in 2001.
In 1998 the much-praised novel The Procedure appeared, a book that fits happily within the author’s varied and ceaselessly rejuvenating body of work. It won the 1999 Libris Literature Prize, one of many literary prizes awarded to Harry Mulisch that include the Constantijn Huygens Prize (1977), the P.C. Hooft Prize (1977) and the Dutch Literature Prize (1995). He was honoured abroad too, named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2001 by the French Ministry of Culture, for instance, while the German government awarded him the Bundesverdienstkreuzes 1. Klasse in 2003 and in Italy he won the Premio Flaiano international literature prize (2003) and the Premio Nonino (2007). In 2000 Mulisch was chosen to write the book presented to readers each year to mark Dutch Book Week. His Book Week book, The Theatre, the Letter and the Truth, about a famously scandalous case involving Dutch actor Jules Croiset, appeared in a record print run of 760,000 copies.
In 1977, on his fiftieth birthday, Mulisch was named Companion of the Order of Orange-Nassau and in 1992 he was promoted to Officer. In 1997 he became a Knight Commander of the Order of the Netherlands Lion. On 8 January 2007 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Amsterdam.
Work by Harry Mulisch has been translated into English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Russian, Hebrew, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian, Serbo-Croat, Slovenian, Indonesian and Chinese. The Assault heads the list, with translations published in over thirty languages.
The death of Harry Mulisch brings an era in Dutch literature to an end. De Bezige Bij owes him a great debt of thanks and mourns the loss of one of its greatest writers as well as one of its most loyal and dear friends.
//Uitgeverij De Bezige Bij