Review
“[Hertmans’s] most recent pastiche of fiction, memoir and Sebaldian evidence gathering [is] inspired by the discovery that his former home in Ghent once housed a notorious Nazi collaborator . . . [The Ascent] deftly blends reporting and speculation as he reimagines the lives these rooms once sheltered, laying out the terrible consequences of an ambitious man’s blinkered devotion to the bureaucracy of the Reich.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“When Belgian author Stefan Hertmans decided to rent a damp old house on the banks of the sludgy Lieveke canal in a rundown neighborhood of Ghent, he wasn’t thinking about its previous inhabitants. . . . But many years after he left the three-story house . . . he learned that, during World War II, it was occupied by Willem Verhulst, an SS intelligence officer. . . . Straddling the line between nonfiction and fiction. . . . [Hertmans] presents a gripping tale of the house on Drogenhof Street, which contains both his own memories and the secrets of the SS officer and his family. . . . Using the house as a framework, the author provides a visceral sense of life in the occupied city during the war. . . . Beautifully translated by David McKay. . . . Hertmans’s parallel stories of Verhulst’s treachery and his own path to uncovering the secrets hidden in the Drogenhof house make for a compelling read. . . . the reader can hardly wait to find out what he discovers.”
—Jewish Book Council
“A fascinating project of autofiction. . . . Hertmans had already sold his former home in Ghent when he read a memoir by a former occupant that shocked him: before he’d lived there, an SS officer had called the place home. Hertmans uses this jarring revelation . . . to explore the home’s long history and reconsider the meaning of sanctuary.”
—CrimeReads
“Hertmans turns the spotlight on the Flemish nationalist and Nazi collaborator Willem Verhulst. . . . paint[ing] a brilliant portrait of a deluded and dangerous man. . . . [The Ascent is] a deft blend of history, fiction and autofiction, skillfully translated by David McKay. Hertmans draws on a wealth of sources . . . [and] the photographs scattered throughout the text bring to mind the work of W.G. Sebald. . . . Eerie and atmospheric. . . . In his insightful and expertly crafted book, history that has settled is roused and reckoned with, and it still has the ability to captivate and the power to shock.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Discovering he lived in a house in Ghent formerly owned by a Nazi collaborator, [Hertmans] experienced ‘the powerful pull of an unknown life’ and set out to investigate. Through a series of anecdotes, he tells the story of Willem Verhulst. . . . [His] impressionistic prose is deeply evocative, and the novel reads like a fascinating conversation, drawing on the storyteller’s absorption with his subject matter and intimate knowledge of the characters involved.”
—Booklist
“‘In the first year of the new millennium . . . I learned that for twenty years I had lived in the house of a former SS man.’ So begins Flemish author Hertmans’ coolly intriguing re-creation of the life and circumstances of Willem Verhulst. . . . As much a story of the family and the setting as of the horrible . . . figure at its center, the book . . . delivers a haunting, detailed record of people, place and atmosphere.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A thoughtful and unflinching narrative in which [Hertmans] imagines the life of his Ghent home’s previous owner. . . . Recreating the lives of the Verhulst family during the grisly period of Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1945 and beyond, Hertmans chronicles how Willem becomes a high-ranking Nazi informant, traces his exploits as a Flemish nationalist rabble rouser after WWII, and explores his romantic attachments. . . . [he] adds nuance by drawing on interviews with Verhulst’s daughters Letta and Suzanne . . . and the memoirs of Verhulst’s son, Adriaan, who was Hertmans’s history professor in the 1970s. . . . along with excerpts from various letters and journals, [which] convey the depth of the author’s immersion. In Hertmans’s hands, the dusty rooms of history come alive.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A powerful and humane reminder that the horrors of the past century are inexhaustibly fascinating and reverberate today.”
—The Observer (UK)
“Hertmans’s acute scrutiny of the grim tale he has unearthed brings a monster and his milieu into riveting focus. Alive with the same investigative verve, psychological perception and narrative virtuosity as its two acclaimed predecessors, The Ascent is a compelling addition.”
—The Sunday Times (UK)
“A self-conscious blend of archival legwork and artistic licence. . . . grimly compelling.”
—Mail on Sunday (UK)
“Prepare to descend. Based on years of research and augmented with personal reflections and fictional episodes . . . the book tells the true story of Willem Verhulst, a Flemish nationalist from Ghent. . . . Hertmans brilliantly describes and imagines scenes. . . . memorable.”
—The Daily Telegraph (UK)
About the Author
STEFAN HERTMANS is an internationally acclaimed Flemish author. For more than twenty years he was a professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent, where he wrote novels, poems, essays, and plays. His first book in English, War and Turpentine, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and awarded the prestigious AKO Literature Prize in 2014. His last book, The Convert, was a finalist for the 2020 National Jewish Book Awards.
Translated from the Dutch by David McKay.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
In the first year of the new millennium, a book came into my hands from which I learned that for twenty years I had lived in the house of a former SS man. Not that I hadn’t received any signals; even the notary, the day I visited the house with him, had mentioned the previous occupants in passing, but at the time my thoughts were elsewhere. And maybe I repressed the knowledge, saturated as I had been for years with the harrowing poems of Paul Celan, the testimonies of Primo Levi, the countless books and documentaries that leave you speechless, the inability of a whole generation to describe the unthinkable. Now I saw my intimate memories invaded by a reality I could scarcely imagine, but could push away no longer. It was as if phantoms haunted the rooms I’d known so well; I had questions for them, but they walked straight through me. There was nothing I was so loath to do as write about the kind of person who now began wandering the corridors of my life like a ghost.
I recalled the day I noticed the house for the first time. It must have been in the late summer of 1979. I was walking through a dusty city park bordered by a row of old houses; through the gaps between the fence posts I glimpsed the backyards. Winding through the rusty rails of one of these fences were the thick, near-black branches of a wisteria. A few late clusters of flowers hung low, sprinkled with dust, but their fragrance touched a deep place, taking me back to the overgrown garden of my childhood; curious, I stopped for a better look through the fence. What I saw was a small, neglected urban garden where a slender maple shot up among nondescript clutter; a coal shed with a little leftover firewood under a layer of black dust; some sixteen feet away, the broken window of a rundown annex; and next to that a porch with a high arched window offering a view of the interior, all the way to the other side. I stared straight through the dark, empty rooms. The front windows gleamed with vague light from afar.
A strange excitement ran through me; I walked out of the park and made a U-turn onto a small, dark street in an old part of town. There I found it: a large town house with a pockmarked front, into which moisture had eaten its way over time. With its high windows and flaking front door, the building had known better days; it was obvious it had been vacant for some years. In one window hung a sign, for sale, wrinkled from the damp. It began to drizzle as it can only drizzle in old cities; the copper flap of the mail slot gave a brief, gloomy rattle in a gust of wind.
The district is called Patershol, named after the narrow canal that gave access to the monastery in the Middle Ages, through which the paters, the monks, would bring in stocks of food and, as the story goes, smuggle whores inside. The area once belonged to the Counts of Flanders; this historic district is next to a twelfth-century fortress and was for centuries the home of the city’s leading dynasties and the haute bourgeoisie. With the rise of the proletariat in the nineteenth century, many stately buildings were replaced with working-class housing. Poverty set in, and over the years the district developed a bad reputation. The narrow alleyways and cul-de-sacs fell into decay until the student revolt of the late 1960s, when bohemian artists settled there. The house I was looking at was on the northeastern edge of the district, on a side street called Drongenhof, not far from where the slow, dark Leie River—the Belgian section of the Lys—flows past the damp old houses.
Imported From: United States