Vintage acquires 'rediscovered classic'

The Bookseller - 01.12.10 - Charlotte Williams

Vintage Classics has acquired "rediscovered classic" The Death of the Adversary by Hans Keilson.

(Author photo left by Herman Wouters for NYT).

Editorial director Laura Hassan bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Sylvie Zannier Betts on behalf of S Fischer Verlag.

The book was written by Keilson in 1942 while he was in hiding from the Nazis, and he buried the pages in his garden for safekeeping during the rest of the Second World War.
The novel portrays a young man fascinated by an "adversary" that is never named, whom he watches rise to power in 1930s Germany.

Hassan said: "We're incredibly proud to bring this rediscovered classic to an English audience. Hailed as a masterpiece on publication in 1961 and more recently as a work of 'genius' in the New York Times, it is a powerful novel about the traps of history. The Death of the Adversary was written whilst Keilson was in hiding and is an affecting account of what he outlived."

Keilson said: "I'm delighted that my work will be available in Vintage Classics, the home of Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse and Gunter Grass. My first novel, Life Goes On, was accepted for publication just before my twenty-third birthday in 1933 and was the last novel that S Fischer Verlag was allowed to publish by a Jewish writer before the new laws. I'm thrilled to hear, just before my 101st birthday, that my second novel will be published once again in the UK."

The novel is translated by Ivo Jarosy and will be published in hardback in April.
It was first published in English in 1962, and has recently been reissued in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.