The Ascent
A House Can Have Many Secrets
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wish list failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for $26.22
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Nicholas Guy Smith
-
Written by:
-
Stefan Hertmans
-
David McKay - translator
About this listen
In this revealing and poignant story, Stefan Hertmans uncovers haunting details about the previous owner of his house and the crime he committed as a member of the Nazi police.
In 1979 Stefan Hertmans became obsessed with a rundown townhouse in Ghent. The previous owners were mentioned only in passing during the acquisition, and it wasn’t until the new millennium, long after he had sold the house, that he came across a memoir by the owner’s son Adriaan Verhulst, a distinguished history professor and a former teacher of Hertmans’, which revealed that his father was a former SS officer.
Hertmans finds he is profoundly haunted by images of the family as ghostly presences in the rooms he had once known so well, he begins a journey of discovery—not to tell the story of Adriaan’s father, but rather the story of the house and the people who lived in it and passed through it. Archives, interviews with relatives and personal documents help him imagine the world of this house as they reveal not only a marital drama, but also a connection between past visitors to the house and important figures in the culture and politics of Flanders now.
A stunning and immersive reimagining of a family in a historical moment of great upheaval confirms Hertmans’ always brilliant melding of fiction and nonfiction.
©2023 Stefan Hertmans (P)2023 Random House AudioWhat the critics say
["“[Hertmans’s] most recent pastiche of fiction, memoir and Sebaldian evidence gathering [is] inspired by the discovery that his former home in Ghent once housed a notorious Nazi collaborator . . . [The Ascent] 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.” —The New York Times Book Review
“When Belgian author Stefan Hertmans decided to rent a damp old house on the banks of the sludgy Lieveke canal in a rundown neighborhood of Ghent, he wasn’t thinking about its previous inhabitants. . . . But many years after he left the three-story house . . . he learned that, during World War II, it was occupied by Willem Verhulst, an SS intelligence officer. . . . Straddling the line between nonfiction and fiction. . . . [Hertmans] presents a gripping tale of the house on Drogenhof Street, which contains both his own memories and the secrets of the SS officer and his family. . . . Using the house as a framework, the author provides a visceral sense of life in the occupied city during the war. . . . Beautifully translated by David McKay. . . . Hertmans’s parallel stories of Verhulst’s treachery and his own path to uncovering the secrets hidden in the Drogenhof house make for a compelling read. . . . the reader can hardly wait to find out what he discovers.” —Jewish Book Council
“A fascinating project of autofiction. . . . Hertmans had already sold his former home in Ghent when he read a memoir by a former occupant that shocked him: before he’d lived there, an SS officer had called the place home. Hertmans uses this jarring revelation . . . to explore the home’s long history and reconsider the meaning of sanctuary.” —CrimeReads