A Posthumous Confession

by Marcellus Emants

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590173473
• ISBN13: 9781590173473
• Release Date: February 2011
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Heredity and the heart

Emants's dark novel is all about the doctrine of hereditary determinism. The main character, Willem Termeer, describes himself as 'my lack of courage and perseverance, my want of feeling, my bent toward the forbidden, were nothing but the poisonous blossoms of seeds germinating in my ancestor ... I was the offspring of degeneracy.' This heredity complex has also strong calvinist roots: 'the God whose justice visits the guilt of the parents not on them but on their children, who are guilty of nothing.' Termeer attacks vehemently the ministers of this Belief: 'In these expositors of the unknowable, these official envoys of the truth and distributors of consolation, I have never been able to see anything but power-hungry fools or like-minded swindlers.' He is daily confronted with calvinist predestination ('to do things as a cat which assumes the right to overturn and dirty a garden') through his wife Anna ('I know what my duty is, and I will fulfill it') in a loveless marriage. Vermeer tries to escape the world of determinism, 'a kind of bare, dark penal colony in which chained criminals are kept working under the lash of pitiless overseers ... a gigantic, mysterious system of cogs which shatters the limbs of its operators at the slightest carelessness or wrong move ... I felt myself slowly dying.' He is advised 'to follow the mighty voice of the heart rather than the weak utterance of a disputed and most disputable doctrine ... The life of the heart has rights, sacred rights.' But therefore, he has to destruct the barrier standing in the way to freedom: his wife, 'with her cold prudishness, her bourgeois devotion to appearances, her nagging self-sufficiency, seemed like a prison wardress appointed by society as a brake on my freedom.' He commits a perfect murder and begins a new life in search for 'real love'. Although scientifically dead, the doctrine of determinism continues to impose its fatalistic character on millions of people through the religious belief of predestination. Emants's novel, written in a gloomy naturalistic language, is still a very worth-while read. Perfect translation by Nobel Prize Laureate J.M. Coetzee.