Hans Keilson, Comedy in a Minor Key
FSG (US) and Hesperus (UK); translated from German
National Book Critics Circle Award finalist
New York Times Notable Book of 2010
A Salon.com Best Book of the Year
Winner of the 2011 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize
"A masterpiece, and Hans Keilson is a genius...
[one] of the world's very greatest writers."
—Francine Prose (review / podcast)
"One of the best short novels I've ever read."
—Andre Alexis, The Globe and Mail
A lost Holocaust classic by a German-Jewish resistance hero, first published in 1947 and never before translated into English.
Comedy in a Minor Key, a penetrating study of ordinary people resisting the Nazi occupation and a dark comedy of wartime manners, tells the story of Wim and Marie, a Dutch couple who hide a Jew they know as Nico during WWII. When Nico dies of pneumonia, how will Wim and Marie dispose of the body without getting posthumously caught?
Also translated by Damion Searls:
Keilson's first novel, Life Goes On
His wartime journal from the year he wrote Comedy, 1944 Diary