Books of the week: Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson and The Death of the Adversary by Hans Keilson

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22 and $14)

Hans Keilson is “a genius,” said Francine Prose in The New York Times. The former psychiatrist, a German-born Jew who just turned 100, possesses “an extraordinarily subtle and penetrating understanding of human nature,” which shines through in two Dutch-language masterpieces that have just been released in new English translations. The first, 1947’s Comedy in a Minor Key, has never appeared in English before. It’s a terse, trenchant tale about a Dutch couple who shelter a Jewish refugee during World War II—only to have him die of natural causes, leaving them with the problem of having to dispose of his corpse. The second, The Death of the Adversary, from 1959, is a more ruminative take on the effects of Hitler’s rise. But both use daring juxtapositions between content and tone, and have become surprisingly fast sellers a half-century after Keilson wrote them.

Death of the Adversary is an unsettling book, said Adam Kirsch in Tablet.com. It’s mostly a portrait of one young Jewish man’s obsession with Hitler, based on the “startling premise” that the enmity between this one faceless victim and his distant persecutor could be so powerful as to somehow become sacred. The narrator distances himself from reality: He never uses Hitler’s name but instead calls him “B.” He never mentions death camps or uses the word “Nazi.” His testimony is fascinating, but there’s something “a little repellent” in the character’s idea that Jews should find some metaphysical meaning in Hitler’s attempt to eradicate them. Still, as “an uncompromising exploration” of an oppressed mind, said Yelena Akhtiorskaya in The Forward, the novel is nearly peerless.

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By contrast, Comedy in a Minor Key is more fast-paced and cinematic, said Linda K. Wertheimer in The Boston Globe. We quickly discover that the Dutch couple’s lodger might be more dangerous to the couple dead than he was alive. They decide to leave his body under an outdoor bench, but in a “tremendous goof,” they dress him in pajamas bearing the husband’s name on a laundry tag. Keilson himself was once sheltered by a Dutch couple to escape the Nazi roundups, so in this book he also “lets us peer into his soul.” Alongside its dark humor, the novel provides a “gripping psychoanalysis” of both the fugitive and his indecisive rescuers.