BOOK · [4950]
The Darkroom of Damocles
Fiction
Hermans's 1958 novel is set in the morally ambiguous world of the Dutch resistance during World War II, where a man takes orders from a mysterious doppelganger and can never be sure who is a true resister and who is a spy. Van Rossum names Hermans his favorite Dutch author from his teenage years, drawn to exactly these early WWII-resistance novels built on uncertainty and unreliable identity.
Endorsed By
1 PERSON-
Guido van Rossum
“As a teenager, my favorite writer was — my favorite Dutch author was a guy named Willem Frederik Hermans, whose writing, certainly his early novels, were all about sort of ambiguous things that happened during World War II... it was very much set in the ambiguous world of resistance against the Germans, where often you couldn't tell whether someone was truly in the resistance or really a spy.”
On the Lex Fridman Podcast #6 (2018), Van Rossum names Willem Frederik Hermans as his favorite Dutch author and describes his early WWII-resistance novels. He names the author rather than a specific title; The Darkroom of Damocles (De donkere kamer van Damokles, 1958) is the most famous of those early novels and matches his description of ambiguous-identity resistance fiction.