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Hella S. Haasse. Fenrir: Een lang weekend in de Ardennen Amsterdam. Querido. 2000. 163 pages ISBN 90-214-6480-2
Dutch
TO QUOTE ONE of the characters in Fenrir, "Wolves are 'in'." Not long ago I reviewed John F. Deane's In the Name of the Wolf (see WLT 74:3, P. 593), and my description of that book then as a psychological thriller about the impossibility of defining good and evil as opposite extremes could apply equally to Hella S. Haasse's novel. "Fenrir" is the name of the wolf in Norse mythology, and Haasse's wolf, too, is a combination of ogre (Fenrir swallowed the sun) and protector (Romulus and Remus were raised by a she-wolf).
In Fenrir, Matthias Crone is a young journalist fascinated by wolf lore. His curiosity is piqued by a newspaper article about Edith Waldschade, a classical...