Comedy in a Minor Key: A Novel

Comedy in a Minor Key: A Novel Feature

• ISBN13: 9780374126759
• Condition: New
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Comedy in a Minor Key: A Novel Overview

A penetrating study of ordinary people resisting the Nazi occupation—and, true to its title, a dark comedy of wartime manners—Comedy in a Minor Key tells the story of Wim and Marie, a Dutch couple who first hide a Jew they know as Nico, then must dispose of his body when he dies of pneumonia. This novella, first published in 1947 and now translated into English for the first time, shows Hans Keilson at his best: deeply ironic, penetrating, sympathetic, and brilliantly modern, an heir to Joseph Roth and Franz Kafka. In 2008, when Keilson received Germany’s prestigious Welt Literature Prize, the citation praised his work for exploring “the destructive impulse at work in the twentieth century, down to its deepest psychological and spiritual ramifications.”

Published to celebrate Keilson’s hundredth birthday, Comedy ina Minor Key—and The Death of the Adversary, reissued in paperback—will introduce American readers to a forgotten classic author, a witness to World War II and a sophisticated storyteller whose books remain as fresh as when they first came to light.

Customer Reviews

Comedy in child tells the story of a young Dutch couple, Wim and Marie, Nico, a perfume merchant jew in his spare bedroom to hide for a year during the Second World War. Wim for their generosity and Mary is not out of passion or political response to injustice is born, but a sense of decency and good-neighborly friendship. In contrast to the heroic stories about the war and the strength of the rebel challenge, Wim and Marie naively stumble by the clumsiness of a foreign body in flightthe enemy. The heaviness of life of hiding with an unknown and risky to take a dangerous turn when you pass by the disease, and the two are forced to have her body.

Hans Keilson enjoyed renewed attention with the English-speaking readers through the first English translation of the play in a minor key, although it was originally published in 1947, and the new edition of his book The Death of the enemy. This slim book (only 135 pages) tells a quietdarkly funny story about human compassion, the astonishing and deeply affected.

What I find so exciting about this work, ironically breaks expectations. As Marie says the man who hid "He defended himself against death from the outside, and then led him to think. It 'was like a comedy, which is expected to result, the hero on the stage, which resolution right out .. And who is left "by Wim, Marie, and Nico, theirActions are not the hero. Marie feels his concealment of his customers are offended fumbles operations Wim trivial or secret, and Nico committing selfish acts. In their effort to do something great, punctuated the life in all its frustrations and accidents.

Keilson skillfully reveals the reality of three deeply human characters live in a impossible situation alienating. This short novel reads smoothly and feels deeply contemporary - with all the existentialabsurdity of a Beckett play and the character flaws of a novel by Jonathan Franzen. Comedy in C minor, is a rare find, and I am deeply grateful that it was finally published here.

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