The background of Mulisch's Boekenweek novella draws on a real Dutch cause célèbre from 1987: An actor faked neo-fascist death threats against himself and others and staged a "kidnapping attempt" to draw publicity to his campaign against a Dutch production of Fassbinder's controversial play Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod (which was widely considered to be antisemitic). Mulisch uses a fictionalised version of these events to explore the complex links between actions and our perceived, stated and (possibly unknowable) real motives for them. Especially in the world of theatre, where everyone is pretending to be something other than they are.

Act One of this reads almost like an entry in a competition to create a Harry Mulisch parody: the main female character is centre-stage throughout, but as a dead body at her own funeral. Her husband is giving the funeral oration, but it seems to be much more about him than her. After the intermission, we're back with a reset stage and there's an ingenious reversal of roles - perhaps not quite as original and audacious as Mulisch claims in his afterword, but still quite a good trick if you can get away with it.

The correction of Mulisch's androcentric view of the universe may be purely nominal, but it's sad to realise that what hasn't lost its relevance in this book is what it has to say to us about the threat to our liberal society from extreme views, and the danger we face if we allow ourselves to forget what actually happened under the Nazis. ( )

Of the Twentieth Century Dutch writers, Harry Mulisch is probably the best known. Although in the Dutch-speaking world there were some contenders, retrospectively Mulisch' work has emerged as the most impressive. Several of Mulisch' novels have been translated into English and various other languages.

Not all of Harry Mulisch' are all that accessible. He has been accused more than once of megalomania, inventing philosophical systems to encompass all that is known and unknown under and in heaven. Some of his novels are easy to read. Het theater, de brief en de waarheid belongs the the category of complicated novels, proposing multiple hypothetical realities in an attempt to understand a mystery.

The mystery consists of a bizarre event which occurred in the Netherlands in 1987. In that year, Jules Croiset, a Dutch actor, tried to prevent the performance of the German play Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod (literally "Garbage, the City, and Death") by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Fassbinder's plays and films elicited a lot of criticism often considered racist, homophobic, or, as in the case of Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod, anti-semitic. To stop the performance of this play in the Netherlands, Jules Croiset wrote a threat letter to himself, followed by the enactment of his (own) kidnap. The non-crime was soon discovered, leaving many people baffled about Croiset's motive and train of thought to conceive and act out this bizarre scheme. Croiset explains himself in the book Met stomheid geslagen, while Mulisch picked up the idea to explore it in Het theater, de brief en de waarheid, which translates literally as "The theatre, the letter and the truth".

Het theater, de brief en de waarheid is a short novel which presents two apparently complementary stories based on the events of 1987. The stories are mirror images of each other, but in the good old (Dutch) tradition of the work of graphic artist M. C. Escher the two versions of the story are mutually exclusive. They cannot both be true at the same time.

Both the link to reality (in as far as needed) and unraveling the two mirror images is difficult and confusing. Het theater, de brief en de waarheid is not a book that will release its secret to the reader easily. It probably needs to be read with some foreknowledge of the background, and or multiple re-readings to figure it out. ( )

leuk boekenweekgeschenk, maar na Siegfried en vooral de ontdekking van de hemel, zijn we niet meer zomaar onder de indruk Harry, dat snap je natuurlijk zelf ook wel. ( )