Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde

Maarten Klein

Twee in één: een doodgewaande fascist en een leraar Duits-Engels
Over De verwondering (1962) van Hugo Claus

Abstract -- In 1962, Hugo Claus’s De verwondering appeared. Many critics at that time considered this novel to be ‘a masterpiece’. Anne Wadman, however, confessed that he did not understand the novel and that he became jealous of all of those critics who seemingly understood Claus’s work so much better than he did. In this article, I will show that the contemporary critics whom Wadman was so jealous of, did not understand De verwondering any better than he did, because they failed to notice one of the novel’s hidden themes. Only very close reading reveals, that the main character Victor-Denijs de Rijckel must be identified with Crabbe, a fascist leader and East Frontfighter. Many text fragments cannot be explained without the knowledge that De Rijckel and Crabbe are one and the same person.

TNTL 120-1 (maart 2004), 2-30