THE LONG FAREWELL - 2025

A young man with an Oedipus complex in 1930s Dresden, Hermann Becht, loses himself in the social and political motives of his time.

His father is in the SS, his mother is Belarusian, and his girlfriend is Jewish. After a brutal clash with his father, Hermann and his mother flee to Paris. Swept along by a maelstrom of events, Hermann ends up as a spy for the British in the Polish extermination camp Treblinka.

The trauma of what he sees in this realm of death intensifies his pessimistic outlook on humanity. In Switzerland, the famous psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung tries to free Hermann of his frightening schizophrenia, but fails to unravel the power of the young man's emotions, especially his intense hate for his father.

What follows is a tragic chain of events, leading to Hermann's ultimate revenge on his father: the apocalyptic bombing of Dresden.

THE LONG FAREWELL is an unforgettable exploration of fascism's lure and the roots of the Holocaust. More than ever, the novel is a mirror for our modern times.

                                                      REVIEWS

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.

Literary Titan – 5 stars      

 A novel looking at the history of Germany pre- and during WWII through a dark mirror

I discovered Bob Van Laerhoven, a Belgian author, and his books several years ago, and I have read many of his novels and short stories that have been translated into English, and always enjoyed them, although “enjoy” is not the right word. Because this author always chooses dark and morally complex and ambiguous subjects, hard to write about and not easy to read either. His novels are a combination of beautiful and compelling writing with profoundly dark subjects that dig deep into the human soul. And this novel is not an exception.
The description above covers the main facts of the plot. This is a novel set in a historical period of turmoil, where we follow a young boy, Hermann Becht, growing up in Dresden, at the time of Hitler’s rise to power. His loving father becomes an eager follower of Hitler, ready to do anything, including betraying superiors and family, to go up the ladder and end up in the SS. His mother, a Belarusian with a traumatic and shady past, sees her husband become a stranger and her own identity questioned, and decides to leave, after a confrontation between her husband and her son that makes her afraid for what might happen next.
Hermann witnesses terrible things all around him, some real and some not, and he finds it more and more difficult to tell the difference. Having lived in Paris, London, after losing his mother and discovering that his uncle is not the person he thought, he does not feel he belongs anywhere, and he feels empty. He tries to fill his void by becoming an artist, and he ends up getting involved in the British Secret Service more by chance than by will.
Hermann’s story goes beyond the typical coming-of-age tale, as his experiences in some way move in parallel and mirror (perhaps using a distorting mirror) the history of Germany and the world at the time. He is a witness to some momentous events, to the point of meeting Hitler in extraordinary circumstances, visiting Treblinka right at the moment when the prisoners of the camp revolted, or being the subject of Carl Jung’s analysis in Berne.
His demons, which he does not fully acknowledge until it is very late, are very similar to those that seem to be behind much of what is wrong with the world, at the time and nowadays. The bombing of Dresden, a historical episode that has been the subject of much controversy (a necessary part of the allied campaign to put an end to the war in Europe, or a war crime, depending on the sources one consults), becomes a symbol and an embodiment of the destructive power of hatred and of the demons of the collective unconscious, of the shadow that most of us fail to acknowledge and never want to analyse or look at too deeply, because it is scary and ugly. But, it is a part of us, and ignoring it causes more harm than good.
The writing is superb, as usual, and combines the beauty of the descriptions and the images the language creates, with the horror of some of the events Hermann witnesses. The story is narrated in the third person, mostly from Hermann’s point of view, but there are also moments when we follow other characters or see things from their perspective, and that gives us a clearer perspective. Although those changes of perspective can take place within the same chapter, and more than once, they are not confusing or difficult to follow, so readers do not need to worry about that. The writing is highly symbolic, and this is not an easy read or a page-turner in the usual sense, but a book that requires attention, concentration, and can be challenging at times, although the rewards are high.
This is not a book for everybody, and it comes with a warning, as there is much violence and very dark and cruel subjects are touched upon. My recommendation remains the same I made for the first book by Van Laerhoven I read: if you’re looking for a complex and challenging historical novel and don't shrink from dark subjects, this is a pretty unique book, and one that seems more necessary and current now than ever.

OlgaNM –Amazon.com- 5 stars

  A riveting thriller and a chilling examination of the human condition

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 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 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 victimization 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.

Avid Kindle Reader-Amazon.com – 5 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.

                                                                    Interview

LITERARY TITAN INTERVIEW: LOVE, HATE, AND EGO

https://literarytitan.com/2025/12/11/love-hate-and-ego/