Novel
A Posthumous Confession
Een nagelaten bekentenis
Marcellus Emants · 1894
Opening lines
Mijn vrouw is dood en al begraven.
Ik ben alleen in huis, alleen met de twee meiden.
My wife is dead and already buried.
I am alone in the house, alone with the two maids.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from dbnl.org
Synopsis
“My wife is dead and buried”: alone in his house with the two maidservants, Willem Termeer, a thirty-five-year-old man of independent means, confesses that he killed her and sets about writing his life in order to explain himself. An orphan early on, raised by a guardian whose daughter, Anna, he marries, he recounts a marriage that disappoints both spouses, the death of their little daughter, his discussions with a neighbour, a former pastor, on free will and heredity, and his jealous passion for a prostitute, Carolien, whom he would like to keep for himself alone.
Context
The third novel by its author, it appeared in 1894 from Van Holkema & Warendorf, in Amsterdam: a tight narrative, without chapters, which applies naturalist ideas about heredity to a single man. Critics have noted that its ending lends itself to two readings. It appeared in German in 1906, in French in 1969, in the translation by Selinde Margueron, and in English in 1975, in that by J. M. Coetzee; Ton Vorstenbosch made a stage adaptation of it in 1978.
Who it is for
A novel of about two hundred and thirty pages, in the first person and without chapters. The narrator is odious from start to finish; the book can be read in French or in English.
Prizes and reception
Its author's best-known novel and a classic of Dutch naturalism; it appears in the Dutch canon surveys of 2002 and 2022.