Marcellus Emants was a Dutch novelist, recognized as one of the few Dutch proponents of Naturalism. His work is considered a significant step towards the renewal and modernization of Dutch literature that emerged in the 1880s. Emants focused on profound psychological analyses and the realistic depiction of human existence. His writing style was characterized by precision and a penetrating insight into the inner lives of his characters.
This collection of short stories by the acclaimed Dutch author Marcellus Emants explores the themes of love, betrayal, and human nature. Written in a spare and elegant style, these stories offer a glimpse into the inner lives of ordinary people, illuminating the complexities and contradictions of the human heart. With its keen insights and subtle irony, this book is a masterful work of fiction that will resonate with readers of all ages.
Termeer, the narrator of A Posthumous Confession, is a twisted man and a troubled one. The emotionally stunted son of a cold, forbidding, and hypocritical father, Termeer has only succeeded in living up to his parents’ low expectations when, to his own and others’ astonishment, he finds himself wooing a beautiful and gifted woman—a woman whose love he wins. But instead of finding happiness in marriage, Termeer discovers it to be a new source of self-hatred, hatred that he turns upon his wife and child. And when he becomes caught up in an affair with a woman as demanding as his own self-loathing, he is driven to murder. What is the self, and how does it evade or come to terms with itself? What can make it go permanently, lethally wrong? Marcellus Emants’s grueling and gripping novel—a late-nineteenth-century tour de force of psychological penetration—is a lacerating exposition of the logic of identity that looks backward to Dostoyevsky, forward to Simenon, and beyond to the confessional literature, whether fiction or fact, of our own day.