Review of Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson

Hans Keilson was a Jew born in Germany who, in the mid-1930s, went into exile in the Netherlands with his wife, and was active in the Dutch resistance. He was a psychiatrist as well as a writer, and died at the age of 101 in May this year.

Comedy in a Minor Key was originally published in 1947. There are two other novels, Life Goes On (1933) and The Death of the Adversary (1959, republished 2010), plus an important clinical study on trauma in children.

Comedy in a Minor Key is a slim novel, barely one hundred pages in length. On the cover of this new Scribe edition is a park bench, the significance of which becomes clear late in the text. The story involves Wim and Marie in the Netherlands during wartime, a couple who hide a Jewish perfume salesman, who they know as Nico. He stays with them for almost a year before developing an infection that worsens into pneumonia, and kills him. This we learn in the first two pages. Since they have been hiding him, he doesn’t really ‘exist’, but now they have to do something with his ‘non-existent’ body.

Continued at Transnational Literature.