Book Review - Comedy in a Minor Key

Today's book is a novella titled Comedy in a Minor Key, written in 1947 by Hans Keilson, but published in English for the first time this year. This small format 135 page work tells the story of Dutch couple who hide a Jew in their house during World War 2. Nico is with the couple for almost a year before dying of pneumonia and needing to be disposed of, which creates its own set of issues.

I found the work to be an amiable enough read, but never felt like it delved too deeply into the characters, of which there were only the three with any significant amount of "on stage" time. I never felt like I knew why the Dutch couple would risk what they did to hide this man other than a vague notion of patriotism in defying the Nazis. I also never got to know the hidden man other than at a superficial level. Perhaps most importantly of all, in a situation that could be fraught with tension, that tension was never really developed. Not that I would necessarily expect this to be written as if it were a thriller, but the nameless faceless entity that Nico was being hidden from never put in an appearance in any form. These factors taken together made this a fairly two dimensional read for me.

3 stars out of 5. Good enough, but nothing worth going too far out of your way to read.

Books read this year: 27 [totalling 6,125 pages]
Published in 2010: 17 [including this in a first English translation]
New authors: 16 [including this]
Classics: still 3