Customer Reviews

The Darkroom of Damocles

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4 star:		(1)
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If you like Hermans and enjoyed Beyond Sleep, you will enjoy this book as well. The slippery identities of the the main character (Henri Osewoudt) and his doppelganger (Dorbeck) are at the heart of this novel about the WW II Underground in Holland--nothing is certain; everything shifts; and there is more than a touch of Kafka here. I had ordered it from Amazon.uk last year after reading Beyond Sleep and read half of it on the plane to Mongolia, only to discover on arrival that I had left it at Inchon Airport. So much did I enjoy it that I had to order a replacement copy upon returning to the US. It was worth paying for twice. Hermans is a treasure largely undiscovered by the US reading public. One hopes that Harvill Secker (UK) and Overlook Press (US) will commission Ina Rilke for further excellent translations of Hermans (perhaps his essays?). For an appreciation of Hermans, see University of Leiden Prof. Willem Otterspeer's review of Beyond Sleep in the Wall Street Journal of 7 July 2007 (p. 8): "Hermans's oeuvre is marked by detached precision and brutal directness. . . In the Netherlands, we know that small literary worlds sometimes maintain well-kept secrets. Hermans has been ours--one that we now gladly share."

Having read and been impressed by "Beyond Sleep" by Willem Frederik Hermans, I sought out THE DARKROOM OF DAMOCLES, which was billed to be his masterpiece. It is set in WWII, and it features a young Dutchman, Henri Osewoudt. Notwithstanding some unusual characteristics (he congenitally has no beard and is very short, his insane mother murdered his father, and he is an expert in judo), Osewoudt is basically an ordinary Dutch citizen, making a living as a tobacconist, when the Germans invade Holland. Shortly thereafter, however, he is unwittingly sucked into the Resistance by Dorbeck, who, but for a difference in coloring (Osewoudt is fair, Dorbeck is dark), is his doppelganger. Almost against his will, Osewoudt ends up participating in a series of strange events, both dishing out and being on the receiving end of various sorts of mayhem. The writing is relatively informal, the pace is rapid, and the plot, though strained in cohesiveness and plausibility, is akin to that of a thriller.

The darkroom of the title plays a prominent role in the novel, and I presume the reference to Damocles simply is an allusion to Osewoudt and his doppelganger. Otherwise I cannot divine any special profundity or symbolism in the title. Nor do I find any overriding meaning or purpose to the novel beyond depicting an insane and random world of Nazi-occupied Holland, in which actions of resistance, rather than being unequivocally heroic, are helter-skelter and permeated with moral ambiguity.

Perhaps this anti-heroic picture of the Resistance was rather new in 1958 when the novel was published, which in turn perhaps accounts for the high literary regard in which the novel reportedly is held. Fifty years later, however, I for one do not share in that enthusiasm. I much preferrred Hermans' "Beyond Sleep." Although I have given both of the novels four stars, "Beyond Sleep" was closer to 4-1/2 stars and THE DARKROOM OF DAMOCLES is closer to 3-1/2 stars.

This novel of occupied Netherlands during World War II is an incredible thriller of philosophical and psychological depths. The novelist perfectly captures the atmosphere of what it was like to live and resist under an occupied force during wartime. You never know the whole picture but still you must act and you must act according to your moral code with the information you have. The best description "mashup" that I can give is that this novel is a combination of the best of Nabokov and Graham Greene. You will not regret reading and thinking about this novel.