Hans Keilson’s 'The Death of the Adversary' and 'Comedy in a Minor Key'
Case Histories
By Inga Clendinnen
Hans Keilson, a retired psychiatrist of German birth who lives in Amsterdam, was four months away from his one-hundred-and-first birthday when, in August 2010, the New York Times critic Francine Prose pointed her magic pen and declared his two long-ago novels, Comedy in a Minor Key (1947) and The Death of the Adversary (1959), to be “masterpieces” and Keilson himself “a genius”. The centenarian – from interviews a man of engag