The Ascent: A House Can Have Many Secrets

Flemish Belgian writer Hertmans (The Convert) delivers a thoughtful and unflinching narrative in which he imagines the life of his Ghent home’s previous owner, who was an SS officer. Hertmans purchased the mildew-covered house as a young man in 1979. In 2000, he discovered it was formerly occupied by Willem Verhulst and his family. 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—particularly to his Jewish first wife, Elsa, who died in 1926, and with whom he requested to be buried. The most fascinating character is Mientje, Verhulst’s second wife and the mother of his children, who despises the SS, but loves her husband, despite his affair with devoted Nazi Griet, whom he marries after Mientje’s death. Hertmans adds nuance by drawing on interviews with Verhulst’s daughters Letta and Suzanne, now in their 80s, and the memoirs of Verhulst’s son, Adriaan, who was Hertmans’s history professor in the 1970s. Images of Elsa’s death certificate and other documents, along with excerpts from various letters and journals, convey the depth of the author’s immersion. In Hertmans’s hands, the dusty rooms of history come alive. (Aug.)