"His death is enough. Tell!""He will fall, Father, like a dead thing, a rotten branch, bare and desiccated, whihc a mountain stream sweeps down into the abyss. Or like a stone, cold and hardened against the perils of a fall through the blind night, leaving no luminous trail that could one day light torches in the memory, before it buries itself in the soil of the steppes which no human or animal foot will ever tread. Such will be his death: bare and unfruitful, like the avalanche of stones under which he lies anonymously buried, the refuse of extinct planets, and there is nothing more to tell."
Hans Keilson's 'The Death of the Adversary' is a very strange book.
Throughout its 208 page, the narrator remains vague and nameless, cities are known only by initials, the country is never referred to and the adversary is never given an identity beyond that. It's a mysterious book strangely lacking in Proper Nouns or concrete ties, that might lock it down to a country, an era, a place.
If you didn't know better, you'd think it was some kind of dystophian coming-of-age story in which the young man pits himself against some kind of Big Brother, where the adversary is a known person and the narrator is one of a persecuted mass. Of course, though, we all do know better - we have all heard of WWII, after all - and then it becomes a bleak and horrifying look at the diabolical relationship between Hitler and the Jews of Germany, of which Hans Keilson was one.
