Hans Koning Books

Koning writes so cleanly, without extraneous words, that it is hard to put his books down. The story just moves right along without digressions. And his style of writing short chapters makes his books even cleaner to read. Just a great novel.

Both the threads in this novel, one set after the Paris Commune, and the other in the Second World War, are interesting. The author has done a wonderful thing : wrapping complexity in a narrative that carries you through with pleasure. The exploration of coincidence, concurrence is interesting, and reminds us how often we pattern our lives with attention to this aspect. Be sure I noted that the most important female character shared a name with my aunt. These little things stand out in our lives.

I picked up Zeeland when I was still reading McCullough's John Adams bio, thinking I would skim through, get a feel for it, and set it aside. I couldn't put it down. The strong narrative voice drew me in within a few pages and the characters kept me involved. Zeeland is easily the most readable novel I've picked up this year, and this had been a competitive year! I plan to recommend it to my men's book club.

Koning's novel about two people who get married almost immediately after meeting and falling in love is a crushing story about how two people can live and be in love, not seeing eye to eye. It is about how unhappy lives are lived. I had never read a love story that portrayed love this honestly, but this one really succeeds. Granted, it isn't the story of all loves, but of a failed attempt at it by two people who wanted it to work.

I read DeWitt's War about 15 years ago and I have never forgotten it. There was something about the story that was "haunting". It not only captured the mood of an occupied country during the Second World War, it also captured the mood of a man who was determined to right a great wrong, no matter the discomfort or danger.

The book never explained why Jerome Witt (the protagonist) acted in this fashion. It seemed that this was part of his character - a man of integrity who would never shirk his duty or abandon his ideals.

This book was also a great detective or suspense novel. The ending is stunning! I highly recoomend this book

what i find most striking about the other reviews of this book is their failure to comment on the fact that this is not a novel.it's a collection of fused fragments.there is a good novella here ,three pretty good short stories and a pair of bookends.the bookends are a literary device aimed at contriving a unity that doesn't flow from what you read.there is a rather boring "foreward" and a moderately more interesting "afterward".i suspect that either the author or an editor concluded rightly that there wasn't much of a market for the fragments of an unknown elderly writer . hence it was decided,this was going to be a novel even if it wasn't.what difference does it make ? well i was so bored by the"lovely","atmoospheric","foreward" that i almost stopped reading the book. i assumed this was an integral part of a novel and not a good portent. as it turns out you can easily skip this part and get on to the meat of the book.in most instances you'll be glad you did.dermout was a good writer.she wasn't a novelist.knowing that will probably increase most peoples pleasure in reading the book ,particularly those who are impatient with seemingly unending description.i almost hate to say it but dermout would have benefited from reading simenon.

Published in Holland in 1955, this has earned a lot of praise for being a singular, mysterious book like nothing else. It's the story of a Indonesian, Felicia, who returns from Holland to her native Indonesia with her baby son.

This book is nothing short of beautiful. It's descriptions are poetic and transporting. Reading this book is like being privy to the dream life of another, a tantalizing keyhole peep into an enchanting, and sometimes terrifying, dream landscape of a vanished era. Things in Dermout's world are magical and mysterious, but there is a reasuring sense of order that is conveyed both in the narrative (a catalog of things) and in the perfect craft of her writing.

Much has been said in praise of this book before, so I would only like to add that not only is it beautifully written, but it also reflects a deep understanding of the place where the story unfolds. Thus the author paints a realistic (though sad) picture of the Moluccas and their people, rather than just using them as an exotic background to her story.

Maria Dermout's 'The Ten Thousand Things' is a finely crafted piece of writing. This really is a classic in so many ways. A brilliant book well worth the read.

This is a book that attempts to set the record straight on Columbus the man and the chain of events set off by his voyage of discovery. Koning does not delight in debunking the myth, nor does he gloat in the exose'; rather the tone is one of moral despair over the actual facts. Essentially the Christian Spaniards slaughtered and enslaved as they plundered the New World. Convinced he had found the fabled way to Cathay ahead of the rival Portuguese, Columbus appears every bit the avaricious social climber of his era. Skilled and daring, he was also venal and petty. Koning's portrait is not a pretty one, but then we've had enough of those.

Koning takes the revered Samuel Eliot Morrison to task for his sanitized portrait of the Great Explorer. Most reprehensive, in Koning's view, is Morrison's utter disregard for the death and destruction left in Columbus's wake and to which he was a party. Seemingly, Morrison's brand of biographical myopia represents a particularly deadly brand of Western ideology at work, one that cleans up the official record on behalf of the powers that be.

Perhaps most praiseworthy in Koning's tratment are the succinct moral parallels he draws between the civilizing forces of Spain in the New World and their 20th century American counterparts in Vietnam, where additional tens of thousands were slaughtered resisting Western conquest. A book like this exposes unmistakably the self-serving mythology that surrounds so much of our official history. Such versions are not misleading by accident, instead they work to a purpose and there seems no better word for describing that purpose than ideological. They are distortions that preserve current institutions of power; namely, those political and economic arrangements that also happen to be products of Columbus's bloody wake. It's interesting to speculate the direction our polity would take were Koning's book, rather than the traditional sanitized versions, required reading in the nation's high schools. Be that as it may, don't expect to see Koning in a Columbus Day parade any time soon.

Koning gives a very valid speculation on Columbus' life and voyages. Thoughout the years, the story of Columbus has been twisted and glamourized, making the people of America believe that he was a hero. Koning goes in to great detail when explaining the truths behind all these mythological ideals. It is an easy read as well as a very good piece of writing.

I encountered this book about the same time I encountered Pick's "The Last Valley".
Both had to do with the backwaters of long, involved wars, The Hundred Years War which inspired "A Walk with Love and Death" and the Thirty Years War which inspired "The Last Valley".
We may be familiar with some of the battles, Poitiers, for example, in the Hundred Years War, or an important figure such as Tilly or Gustavus Adolphus.
Ultimately the face of Europe changed, if we consider dynasties, maps, and so forth.
What is less known is what happens when a society whose technology does not allow for much resilience is repeatedly and horribly ruined by battles, armies marching and countermarching, unemployed mercenaries trying to make a living, plagues exacerbated by famine and exposure (homes and cities burned), bandits and brigands.
Into this perfect horror of anarchy come two young lovers. Thrown on to the road, so to speak, they attempt to survive the bandits, mercenary bands, starvation, fanatical cultists, and to find someplace of refuge.
It is possible that the author added more travails than would have normally occurred. Clearly, if one is murdered early in the book, no time is left to nearly starve, to be chased by bandits, to encounter a self-mutilating medieval version of Heaven's Gate, and be threatened by local warlords.
Both this book and "The Last Valley" were made into movies.
I encountered the movie--starring Angelica Huston and Assaf Dayan--when I was at Ft. Jackson in 1970
Ordinarily, the best lines in movies in post theaters are supplied by the audience, and are uniformly hilarious. Movies are far more entertaining seen this way.
This movie played to absolute silence.
When I got out of the movie, and the rest of the usually irrepressible and vigorous Infantrymen were walking out silently, I stopped to look at the sunset, taking deep breaths.
The street past the theater was a long, shallow grade. As I watched, a big tactical deuce and a half came up the street, snarling in low gear, carrying the guard reliefs.
"Thank God," I thought, "somebody's in charge."

When nobody's in charge, the peasants eventually cease planting, defying culture, history, and possibly even their genes. The saga of the archers at Poitiers, or the Swiss mercenaries trailing their pikes back and forth across Europe cover the absolute horror the wars caused. This is a book to remind us of what we don't see, in Europe or the Americas at this point. Although certain areas of Africa may well look similar.

The book is a riveting read, although depressing. I wouldn't read it before a family function, nor before bed.

There are very few books I've read more than once. Life is short, and the TBR pile tall. The one book I keep going back to every ten years or so is A Walk with Love and Death, by Hans Koning, a spare, elegant love story set in 1538 in France. The author was Hans Koningsberger when I first read him--it must have been the spring of 1963.

In later years, I found it difficult to find copies of the novel. This was before the Net, and finding a copy of a particular out-of-print book meant stopping in at various used bookstores and searching the shelves, one bookstore at a time. I ordered it though my small-town library, and a copy was sent to me from afar. I read it, loved it yet again, and could not bear to be parted from it. I was beginning to write myself, and Koning's spare style was something of a beacon for me.

And then, with the Net, and the all-powerful and astonishing ability to seek out any title, any author, I discovered that the book I loved was by Hans Koning, that he was a professor at a university in the U.S., and that not only was he alive and well, but had published quite a number of books. I might have written him then...but my life was busy, and so I did not.

A few weeks ago, having sent of the "final" changes to my soon-to-be-published novel, I took A Walk with Love and Death down off my shelf. It had been 44 years since I had first read it. Perhaps the author had a website, I thought. In no time, I found it, and through the contacts page, I was finally able to send him a letter, telling him how much I love this novel, and how much it has taught me about writing.

The email was bounced back. Hans Koning died this spring, only months before. It brings tears to my eyes even now. I had missed my chance.

I have just finished yet another reading of A Walk with Love and Death. I still love this book. Such beautiful sentences! I'm going to quote from the opening lines, which I think set the tone beautifully for the bitter-sweetness of the story, and the elegance of the prose:

"In the spring of that year, 1358, the peasants of northern France did not sow their fields any more.

"I had succeeded in getting out of Paris just before sunset and walked to Saint-Denis in the twilight; I had found a room there to sleep and now was on the road again.

"The sun was rising almost opposite me; a harsh light skimmed the empty fields. The war was in its twentieth year, but I was happy.


The ending: ah, I resist the obvious.

It's an easy read, a simple tale of love in the Middle Ages. A poor man falls for an aristocrat woman and they must escape her demolished home.

First, if you're looking for contemporary, 2006, Chinese life, look elsewhere.

This is an over-40-years-old view, but one which -- there were a number of such books -- the author gives a snapshot of what was going on in China in 1965. It's a well-written, interesting cut on what was going on in that country then. And it's interesting to see how much of that has played out as China enters the 21st century.

The author writes with a novelist's flair. Meaning, the book is enjoyable, fascinating, and a page-turner. It needs to be back in print.

A stirring account of revolutionary organization and unrest in an unnamed European country. The Dutch-born author, who escaped Holland and fought with the British in World War II before moving to this country, has a very long and honorable main career as a radical journalist.

The conflict imagined in this novel is of the sort that dominated Western history from 1848 through the present. Koning is very much on the side of the revolutionaries -- who would dare to call them "terrorists?" -- but he is never blind to their weaknesses and failings.

In 1970, this novel was made into a first-rate if underappreciated film starring Oscar-winner Jon Voight as the title character.