BEYOND SLEEP in The Wall Street Journal

Great notice in this past weekend's Wall Street Journal of Willem Frederik Hermans' Beyond Sleep:

"Since its publication four decades ago, "Beyond Sleep" (the Dutch is "Nooit meer slapen") has come to be regarded as one of the founding books of modern Dutch literature, even if Hermans's countrymen never quite embraced the man himself. The novel -- which has inexplicably languished, until now, without an English translation -- tells the story of Alfred Issendorf, an ambitious geology student from Holland who joins a scientific expedition to Lappland, one that is beset by bad equipment and bad luck. Under Hermans's steady hand, the tale is marked in turns by exhilarating comedy and fateful tragedy.

But no thumbnail description of "Beyond Sleep" can begin to suggest the richness and complexity of a novel that humbled many a Dutch critic into nail-biting sessions of rereading. Hermans's expression of his "creative nihilism" was anything but simple, though it was conveyed in the author's hallmark style: short, pungent sentences studded with details gleaned from close observation."