THE LONG FAREWELL (part two) - 2025

The Long Farewell is the kind of historical novel I finish and immediately want to talk about, not because it’s “enjoyable” in the easy sense, but because it’s so deliberate in what it’s trying to show. This book is heavy, psychologically sharp and morally complicated, and it stays in your head long after you close it.

The novel also doesn’t treat history like background. The rising machinery of fascism changes what’s possible minute by minute. You can feel how quickly a society’s options narrow, and how people start rationalizing what they once would have called unthinkable. That’s where the book becomes genuinely disturbing. The book keeps returning to the idea that survival, revenge, obsession and ideology can mix until a person can’t tell where one ends and another begins.

Carola Schmidt – Goodreads- Amazon - Five stars

This novel reads like a confession delivered through smoke and rubble. Bob Van Laerhoven stitches the personal and the political until they’re impossible to separate: desire, shame, identity, power, and the machinery of the era grinding everything down. The writing carries a cold clarity, and the psychological focus keeps the horror from becoming abstract. It’s not just what happens, but what it does to a person’s inner weather. A grim book, but a purposeful one.

Harper Green – Goodreads – Four stars

It’s dark, messy, and tense in a very human way, following a man whose life gets shaped by family cruelty and a toxic political moment he can’t outrun. The writing doesn’t soften anything, and the more Hermann spirals, the more you feel how resentment can swallow a person whole. It’s not a comfort read, but it’s the kind of book you keep thinking about after you close it.

CHenry Roi – Goodreads – Five stars

Reading The Long Farewell is not like any other Historical Fiction. It's set against the crumbling, anxious backdrop of pre-war Dresden. The novel doesn't just describe history; it traps you inside it.

Alilartbookworm – Booktok

The Long Farewell feels like a candle carried through a corridor where the air keeps changing—sweet with love one moment, metallic with fear the next. Van Laerhoven writes Hermann Becht as a man stitched together from impossible inheritances: a father sworn to cruelty, a mother marked by displacement, and a love that becomes both refuge and target. Dresden to Paris to the black mouth of Treblinka, the book moves with grim purpose, never letting you pretend history was distant or tidy. It’s intimate without being gentle, political without turning into a lecture, and the dread comes from how ordinary the first steps toward horror can seem. Verdict: four and a half moonlit petals out of five

Book Witch Reviews – Instagram

The Long Farewell is bleak, intense, and strangely hypnotic. It drops you into a mind that’s already cracked, then keeps tightening the screws as history closes in. The setting work feels sharp without turning into a textbook, and the story never lets you forget what ideology can do to ordinary lives. It’s not an “enjoyable” read in a cozy sense, but it’s a powerful one. I finished it feeling unsettled and quiet.

Trisha Cole – The StoryGraph

The Long Farewell is the kind of historical novel that doesn’t “take you on a journey” so much as it drags you into a moral storm and refuses to let you look away. It’s bleak, intelligent, and intentionally uncomfortable—less interested in giving you a hero to root for than in showing what happens when a damaged psyche collides with a damaged century.

At its core, this book is a portrait of Hermann Becht, a young man shaped by obsession, fear, and a family dynamic that feels like a private war long before Europe’s public one fully ignites. The story moves through multiple countries and contexts, but the throughline is Hermann’s inner fracture: his twisted attachment to his mother, his hatred of his father, and the way ideology, trauma, and self-delusion braid themselves into something he can’t escape. The title isn’t just about leaving places. It’s about leaving versions of yourself behind—sometimes by force, sometimes by choice, and sometimes because there’s nothing left.

What makes the novel hit so hard is that it’s not satisfied with the obvious horrors of its era. Plenty of books set around fascism and World War II focus on external danger (bombs, uniforms, borders). Van Laerhoven does that too, but he’s far more interested in the quieter, uglier invasions: the way power gets into a home, into a marriage, into a child’s mind, into language, into desire. The violence that matters most here often starts before the first official “war scene” ever arrives.

Hermann as a protagonist (or anti-protagonist) is a risky choice, and the book knows it. He’s not designed to be lovable. He’s not even consistently reliable as a lens. He’s unstable, sometimes self-serving, sometimes genuinely broken, and sometimes horrifyingly calm in the middle of things that should shatter any normal person. That discomfort is part of the point. The novel keeps asking, in different ways: how much of a person is choice, and how much is conditioning? Where does responsibility begin when the mind itself is splintering? And what does “revenge” mean when the world has already become a machine for cruelty?

The family triangle is the early engine: father in the SS, mother with her own complicated history, and Hermann caught between worship and rage. If you’ve read a lot of WWII fiction, you may think you know how that setup will play out. This book doesn’t go where you expect, partly because it’s driven by psychology more than plot convenience. Hermann’s father isn’t just “the Nazi father.” He’s an intimate threat—someone who can weaponize authority inside the house as easily as outside it. Hermann’s mother, meanwhile, isn’t simply a victim to be protected. She feels like her own kind of mystery: adored, idealized, and perhaps never truly seen as a full person by the men around her. That tension matters, because Hermann’s obsession is not romanticized here; it’s shown as a distortion that eats him from the inside.

When the story moves into broader European spaces—Paris, Switzerland, and beyond—the book widens without losing its claustrophobia. That sounds contradictory, but it’s the effect: the geography expands, yet Hermann carries his private nightmare with him. The political world may change from street to street, but his mind keeps returning to the same locked doors.

One of the boldest choices is how the novel handles the sheer historical weight of what it touches. There are scenes and references connected to atrocities that many authors treat with either reverence or sensationalism. This book largely avoids the second. It doesn’t need gore or explicitness to make its point. Instead it leans on the numbness, the dread, the corruption of daily reality, and the way witnessing can deform a person. In that sense, it’s more psychologically brutal than visually brutal. If you’re looking for a WWII thriller that keeps things “plotty” and clean, this won’t be your match. The horror here is slow, moral, and personal.

The inclusion of Carl Gustav Jung as a character is another high-wire move, and it gives the novel an extra layer of fascination. On one level, Jung’s presence signals that the book wants to talk openly about the mind—archetypes, shadows, projection, obsession, repression—without turning into a textbook. On another level, it creates a charged dynamic: can any form of therapy, insight, or intellectual language actually reach someone like Hermann? Or does analysis become another stage where Hermann performs, manipulates, rationalizes, and hides? The sessions (and the very idea of them) act like a mirror held up to the era itself: a civilization trying to “understand” what it’s doing while still doing it.

Stylistically, the prose has a cold beauty to it—controlled, often intense, and willing to sit in discomfort. It doesn’t rush to soften edges. If anything, it sharpens them. The tone fits the subject: you get a sense of inevitability building across the book, like a long fuse burning toward a destination everyone already knows is coming, yet still feels shocking when it arrives. That’s especially true as the novel approaches Dresden. The bombing is not treated as a simple set-piece. It becomes a kind of symbolic endpoint, tied to Hermann’s personal mythology and his need for a final gesture that feels, to him, like cosmic justice. The novel doesn’t ask you to cheer that on; it asks you to watch what revenge does to a person’s sense of reality, and how easily personal hatred can latch onto historical catastrophe.

Pacing-wise, this is not a quick weekend read, even if you fly through pages. It’s emotionally heavy. The book’s intensity comes in waves: family tension, political dread, psychological spirals, then long stretches where you can feel Hermann’s internal logic forming—dangerous and strangely coherent on its own terms. Some readers will find that hypnotic. Others will find it exhausting. I think the exhaustion is intentional, because the novel is essentially asking you to inhabit a mind and a world where relief is temporary and moral clarity is constantly under attack.

What I appreciated most is that the book doesn’t flatten its themes into slogans. It doesn’t present a clean lesson about evil. It shows how evil can be banal, institutional, domestic, eroticized, justified, inherited, and internalized. It also shows how victimhood and guilt can tangle together in ways that don’t fit easy categories. Hermann’s suffering doesn’t excuse him. His damage doesn’t absolve him. The book stays in that tension. It trusts the reader to sit with complexity without being told what to think.

That said, this novel is not for everyone. If you’re sensitive to content involving fascism, psychological illness, obsessive family dynamics, and Holocaust-related settings, you should approach carefully. It’s not written to shock for sport, but the subject matter itself is heavy, and the psychological angle can make it feel even more intimate than “standard” historical fiction.

Who I think will love it:

* Readers who like historical fiction that feels intellectually sharp and morally challenging

* People interested in psychology and the way trauma shapes identity

* Anyone drawn to darker European wartime fiction that refuses easy comfort

Who might want to skip it:

* Readers looking for warmth, redemption arcs, or clear heroes

* Anyone who prefers WWII fiction to keep distance from the darkest parts of the era

* Readers who don’t enjoy spending long stretches inside an unstable, unsettling mind

In the end, The Long Farewell feels like a warning carved into a novel: not just about what happened, but about what can happen when obsession meets ideology, when personal cruelty is legitimized by the state, and when a mind learns to call its own darkness “purpose.” It’s a harsh book, but it’s also a serious one—ambitious, fearless, and unwilling to hand you comfort when the truth it’s chasing has none.

Ava -Coffee.Book.Couch- GoodReads-  Four stars

A story of a time when one's moral compass is being challenged by belief, duty, loyalty and survival. This is Hermann's life story navigating his growth and dilemma within his family, kin, friends, loved ones and country in the climate of the second world war.The story is told in formidable narratives, strong characters and excellent editing. The book is velvety to read.It resonates with the current, restless world we all are grappling with today. An excellent book, highly recommended!

Zea Perez –Philippines- GoodReads – Amazon.com - Five stars

The Long Farewell is a haunting and relatable story set in the grim rise of Nazi Germany. It follows Marina Nesdrova, a Belarusian refugee trapped in a loveless marriage to an ambitious German officer, and her son Hermann, a boy torn between the warmth of his mother and the cold ideology consuming his father. Through their eyes, the book reveals the slow poisoning of ordinary lives by fanaticism. Love, guilt, betrayal, and fear mix with the heavy shadow of history, turning the personal into something almost mythic. Author Bob Van Laerhoven writes with the precision of a historian and the soul of a poet, weaving the domestic and the political into a tapestry that feels both intimate and terrifying.

What I liked most was the raw, unfiltered emotion beneath the words. Every page hums with quiet menace. The author doesn’t let us look away, and I found myself torn between admiration and discomfort. Marina’s despair feels like a slow drowning. Hermann’s innocence is eaten away scene by scene until you realize there’s no escape for him. Laerhoven’s prose is elegant but never showy. He keeps the sentences sharp and grounded, and the translation by Vernon Pearce carries a dark rhythm that lingers. It’s not just a story about Nazis and victims, it’s about what happens when love rots in the shadow of power.

I won’t lie, reading it was emotionally difficult. I felt angry, then sad, then strangely numb. The violence is understated yet suffocating. It creeps in like a chill. I found myself wanting to shake the characters, to warn them, but they kept walking toward their fate, blind and hopeful in equal measure. What I loved most, though, was how the book refuses to moralize. It just presents life as it was, messy, cruel, and tragically beautiful. It’s that honesty that makes it unforgettable.

The Long Farewell is not a book you finish and set aside. It's a book that keeps you thinking well after it's ended. I’d recommend it to anyone who loves historical fiction that bites deep, who doesn’t mind feeling a little broken when they turn the last page. If you want to look straight into the heart of human weakness and still find traces of grace there, this book will stay with you for a long time.

Book Reviewer – GoodReads- Literary Titan - Five Stars

Van Laerhoven uses the dramatic and fraught historical setting of world war II as the backdrop for a riveting psychological thriller, exploring guilt, trauma, and revenge, along with the lure of fascism.

As a thriller its pace is initially measured, taking its time to draw the reader in, to hold them, to seduce them into engaging with the historical events at a human level …. So that later, as the pace quickens and the reader is taken to ever more terrifying places, they will be compelled to read on, not to look away. It is a work that takes the darkest moments of the last century and exposes them with the unflinching gaze that is characteristic of this author. Bob van Laerhoven’s works are never easy but they never betray the reader's courage in reading on. The final part of the book returns to a slower pace, asking the reader not only to experience the story but to understand it, to travel with its characters to a place of reflection. That too, is an uncomfortable journey.

Of course, I knew the outcome of the events that form the terrible backdrop to this story. I knew what happened in the ghettos, in Treblinka, in Dresden… I knew the numbers, the toll. Yet as I read, I found myself, despite my rational, haunting, retrospective knowledge, so caught up in the characters and the action that I was still rooting for their contribution to prevail, to make the outcome different. That suspension of retrospect is the mark of a great historical novel.

The book was first published in Flemish, in 1985, forty years on from the end of the War. And yes, as I read this recent translation, forty years on from that, I also knew what has happened in the decades since, and recently. The terrible ironies of that made the book even harder to read. But in truth the awful reality of recent political events is already prefigured in the personal development of Hermann across the arc of the novel and explored in its conclusion. What van Laerhoven knows from his long experience in modern warzones is that however much one roots for the victim, oppression and victimisation do not make saints of human beings. Trauma does not teach kindness. Cruelty is meted out by the oppressor and inherited by the victim. For Van Laerhoven, the human condition is a fatal infection.

Carly Rheilan – GoodReads – Amazon.com -Five Stars

This ambitious novel tackles enormous historical events—the Holocaust, Dresden, SS complicity, and post-war trauma—through the life of a complex and three dimensional character: the troubled son of an SS officer and Belarusian woman, the lover of a Jewish girl, a traitor to his country as he spies for the British. This is not light reading; it makes a vast and terrible history both intimate and visceral. Readers expecting a conventional historical thriller may be challenged by its psychological weight. But it’s more than just historical fiction. As well as depicting the appalling dissolution from within of the soul of the German nation, it is also a profound exploration, informed by psychoanalysis, of the inner dissolution of a man broken by his era.
It is a challenging but deeply rewarding read. The conflicted human psychology that it depicts, and that informs the politics of those times, is as relevant now as it was then.

Absolutely worth reading.

DJ – Amazon Canada – Five Stars

The Long Farewell is the kind of historical novel that stays with you because it never feels distant or abstract. Bob Van Laerhoven writes with real weight, but the story still feels human, focused on people caught inside a brutal time rather than history reduced to facts on a page. Hermann is not a simple character.
I like the gradual pull of ideology and fear, and how ordinary lives can be shaped, damaged, and redirected by larger forces.