This is the shortest of the author’s novels to be translated into English. The compelling narrative, the twists and turns of the plot, make the book difficult to put down. It was written twenty-five years ago when many people still regarded lesbian relationships as unnatural and not to be flaunted openly. Others were sympathetic and welcomed Mulisch’s courageous engagement with a hitherto largely taboo subject.


The story starts with a midnight telephone call from a nursing home in Nice to the female curator of a small Amsterdam museum, the narrator of the tale. Her mother has just died and she immediately sets off on the long car journey south. By the end of the book she still has not quite reached her destination. The account of what happens to her on the way is interspersed with a series of flashbacks in which she tells of her tender but tumultuous relationship with a younger woman and the effect this had not only on themselves but on others, including her mother, her lover’s parents, and her ex-husband.


The novel bears some of its distinguished author’s hallmarks: an imaginative realism and a haunting undercurrent of doom foreshadowing the affair’s conclusion, that pervades the whole cleverly-structured work. There are comic moments, including a hilarious scene reminiscent of French farce when the provincial, unsuspecting mother of the younger woman turns up unannounced at the lesbian love-nest. The novel also reflects Mulisch’s long-standing interest in the theatre and in the boundary between illusion and reality (a theme to which he returns in Last Call). His wickedly satirical account of a scabrous, homo-erotic play at an Amsterdam drama festival, which forms one of the book’s episodes is not to be missed!

I read an interview in the paper with a writer whose play was to have its premiere at the Holland Festival. He said that the Greeks always had women’s roles played by men disguised as women. ...That’s why he had decided to portray the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as the story of two men....

‘Do you feel like going there?’ I asked Sylvia.

I thought perhaps the play could provide some kind of perspective to the situation that we ourselves were in....

It was her first premiere and she made herself a dress of black silky linen. But in the lobby of the theatre it was evident that we were not the only ones who had received the message. The most elegant homos of the city were there, — the elder ones carefully coiffed above their seamed faces with occasionally a red-lined cape over their shoulders, the younger ones with long blonde tresses, and see-through lace shirts open down to their navels, jewellery dangling in their breast hair and their eyes everywhere except on the person they were with. (p. 56-7, tr. Els Early)