The Dutch writer Harry Mulisch, indites the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, "is an author who has to hide his stupendous intelligence. He does not always succeed." Critics at times deride, and often celebrate, the Hollander's increasingly influential work for its wide range of intellectual indulgences—a tendency climaxing in the novels The Assault, The Discovery of Heaven, and his recent Procedure. Born in Haarlem, Netherlands, in 1927 to a Jewish mother and an Austrian father, Mulisch initially wanted to pursue a scientific career. He was compelled to leave school, the lyceum, in 1944, and decided to become a writer instead. Short stories, novels, plays, poetry, essays, and other non-fiction pieces are all part of his opus, yet only his novels have so far found international acclaim: he is said to have once quipped that he had finally attained "world renown" for all his work—but only in the Netherlands. The earliest of Mulisch's pieces translated into English is his ninth published work, the novel The Stone Bridal Bed. First published in 1959, it recounts the return of the American dentist Norman Corinth to the German city of Dresden, which he bombed as a pilot in World War II. Corinth finds himself among people with similarly dark pasts, and in a present too often reduced to Cold War propaganda. Mulisch's own "German" father managed to protect his Jewish wife and young Harry during the Nazi occupation, but was later interned in a camp as a collaborator. As the first of many works in dialog with his personal history, Mulisch covered the Nazi Eichmann's trial for the Elseviers Weekblad in 1961, traveling to Israel, Berlin, Auschwitz and Maidjanek. His research cumulated in De zaak 40/61, a journalistic account awarded the Vijverberg prize in 1963. It was the first in a long list of awards, among them the Prijs van de Nederlands Letteren in 1995. Throughout the Seventies, Mulisch also branched out into drama; Oidipus Oidipus, Bezoekuur, and the opera libretto, Axel, saw subsequent stage productions. In 1980, the now increasingly popular writer's novel Two Women became available in English. The book tells of a lesbian couple's fated love affair doomed by increasing isolation. A translation of the poetry collection What Poetry Is appeared in 1982, quickly followed by the widely acclaimed novel The Assault. In it, the traitorous police chief of Nazi-occupied Haarlem is assassinated, the body dragged in front of the young protagonist Anton's home. The Gestapo executes the boy's family in retaliation. Anton returns to Haarlem years later to eventually encounter the many people involved in the assassination, all of whom confess knowledge but deny responsibility. Mulisch's portrait of the difficulties of post-war Dutch society is considered his first truly important piece. John Updike endorsed The Assault in The New Yorker, exclaiming that, "with the cool passion of a scientist, Mr. Mulisch scrapes rust from the Forties' steel hell and gives violence its anatomy." The book was Mulisch's first to compel attention by English-writing scholars: Graham Frost's article "Shall We Talk About Light" appeared in Modern Language Studies 24.4 (1994), and "The Occupied Mind" by Margriet Bruijn Lacy in The Low Countries 3 (1990). The Assault's movie version won both the Golden Globe and the Oscar for best foreign film in 1987. Critics read Mulisch's next major work, Last Call, with somewhat muted enthusiasm. Updike wrote, "The sum of Last Call seems less than its parts. But what parts they are!" A theatric novel in five acts, Last Call toys with an aging actor's role in a play within a play, and with his having to guide a new generation of actors from this ponderable position. In 1996, a translation of The Discovery of Heaven made Mulisch's masterpiece available to English-readers. Nobel prize winner J.M. Coetzee declared, "Harry Mulisch belongs to the first rank of Dutch novelists of his generation" and included his review of the novel—widely regarded the most important critical work on Mulisch in English—in his collection of literary essays, Stranger Shores (Penguin Books, 2002). The novel drew some criticism for its intellectual aloofness, yet critics largely embraced it. Paul Binding of London's Spectator honored Mulisch as "unquestionably the doyen of Dutch writers" and the Review of Contemporary Fiction's Irving Malin proclaimed the work "one of the great novels since World War II." The Discovery of Heaven is Mulisch's excursion into European magical realism. In it, two angelic beings plot a gesture of God's retreat from humanity: the return to heaven of the original tablets bearing the Ten Commandments. By engineering "coincidences" they cause the conception and upbringing of the perfect agent, a boy named Quinten. Mulisch constructs a massive backdrop narrative comprised of discourses in philosophy, science, theology, and most all of the humanities with what the Wall Street Journal's Jamie James saw as "a close affinity to epic poetry." The Discovery of Heaven was less enthusiastically received by more religiously oriented critics. In Commonweal, Molly Flinn remarked that Mulisch had created "a heaven that is a wasteland of abstraction . . . There is no redeemer here." Wheaton College professor Roger Lundin explains in an interview with MARS HILL AUDIO that Mulisch describes a twentieth century Calvinism "for whom the thought of election, sovereignty, and order remain—but for whom the personality of creation, the personality of God have been lost." Following the huge success of The Discovery of Heaven, Mulisch's passionately debated next novel, The Procedure, became available in English in 2001. The novel tells of a man who assumes divine potency as he imbibes dead matter with life—and yet very humanly fails to save the life of his unborn child, and subsequently, his marriage. In a series of briefs and letters addressed to his dead daughter, he struggles with the human condition and the tendency to want to interfere in creation. The narrator remarks, "[God's] creation, too—the world, man—is linguistic in nature, ultimately a question of spelling, just like the world and the people that I in turn wish to conjure up" in respelling the genetic code. Los Angeles Times critic Michael Henry Heim observed that Mulisch "understands that creating life, even as the human race has always created it, is a tortuous process, one involving infinitely more subtleties than the process he has developed." "The act of creation haunts the narrative," The Independent's Julia Pascal adds, "and Mulisch has found an original and seductive way of exploring hubris." Very little of Mulisch's short story and non-fiction corpus is available in English. "To the Wilderness I Wonder" was published in the Hudson Review, and is included in its story collection, The Modern Image, edited by Frank Morgan (Norton, 1965). World's Best Science Fiction (Ace, 1965) includes Mulisch's "What Happened to Sergeant Masuro?" The story "From the Darkness" is part of the anthology Short Stories International edited by E.W. Johnson (Houghton Mifflin, 1969). Volume 2 of Egbert Krispyn's compilation Modern Stories from Holland and Flanders (Twayne, 1973) has "The Horses Jump and the Fresh Sea." Finally, Mulisch contributed "Death and the Maiden" to Hyman Aaron Enzer's Anne Frank: Reflections on Her Life and Legacy (U. Illinois Press, 2000). A short biographical sketch of Harry Mulisch appears in Anne Frank and After by van Galen Last and Wolfswinkel (Amsterdam U. Press, 1996). [Posted July 2003, JGR]		Roger Lundin, on Harry Mulisch's novel, The Discovery of Heaven (MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, ) MHT-026.2.4