Remarkable origins ... [A] hybrid work, a deft blend of history, fiction and autofiction, skillfully translated by David McKay. Mr. Hertmans draws on a wealth of sources ... 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.
Hertmans 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 ... Hertmans’s narrative vividly documents domestic tensions that echo the larger hostilities engulfing Belgium in the 1930s and ’40s. But what might have been an all-too-familiar portrait of a fanatical, philandering SS functionary is overshadowed by a nuanced depiction of Verhulst’s deeply religious wife, Mientje, who was raised to be a subservient caregiver and is completely dependent on his salary for the survival of their three young children.
The Ascent lacks the originality and weight of Austerlitz, but Hertmans’s hybrid of history and fiction is nevertheless a powerful and humane reminder that the horrors of the past century are inexhaustibly fascinating and reverberate today.
The project of covering a whole life means that Hertmans must rush through things, and the details blur, so what should be a book of particulars becomes one of atmosphere ... We get an awful lot of the curse of the modern genre-bending book: an inability to see the subject because of the author standing in the way ... Still, the core details stand strong.
As much a story of the family and the setting as of the horrible yet ludicrous figure at its center, the book, while overlong, delivers a haunting, detailed record of people, place, and atmosphere.
