Ashes

Nicholas Spice

• The Assault by Harry Mulisch, translated by Claire Nicolas White
  Collins Harvill, 204 pp, £8.95, November 1985, ISBN 0 00 271011 0
• All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Angus Davidson
  Carcanet, 300 pp, £9.95, March 1985, ISBN 0 85635 593 3
• Family Sayings by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by D.M. Low
  Carcanet, 181 pp, £7.95, May 1984, ISBN 0 85635 504 6
• The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Dick Davis
  110 pp, £6.95, June 1985, ISBN 0 85635 553 4
• Strange Loop by Amanda Prantera
  Cape, 175 pp, £8.50, June 1984, ISBN 0 224 02210 5
• The Cabalist by Amanda Prantera
  Cape, 184 pp, £8.95, September 1985, ISBN 0 224 02326 8

‘Il Figlio dell’Uomo’, ‘The Son of Man’, an essay by Natalia Ginzburg written in 1946 for the paper Unita, begins: ‘There has been a war and people have seen so many houses reduced to rubble that they no longer feel safe in their own homes which once seemed so quiet and secure. This is something that is incurable and will never be cured no matter how many years go by.’ Thirty-six years went by and in 1982, in Holland, Harry Mulisch published De Aanslag, a novel in which Anton Steenwijk, aged 12, watches his family home, the house he has grown up in, reduced, in a matter of minutes, to rubble, by the action of a couple of German grenades and a flamethrower. Standing around in the dark and the cold, ‘laughing and talking’, members of the Grüne Polizei warm themselves at the fire that is consuming Anton’s world, where only a moment earlier, quiet and secure, he had been playing ludo with his mother and brother before going up to bed. As the house collapses ‘under a fountain of sparks as high as a tower’, Anton hears a burst of machine-gun fire. He never sees his mother and father and brother again.