The novel opens with one of the most arresting passages in Dutch literature in which the narrator tells us he has murdered his wife, realizes this was pointless since he cannot now enjoy his freedom, and describes what he sees when he looks in the mirror — ‘a pale delicate insignificant little man with dull gaze and weak, slack mouth’.


Where can the novel go after this? What follows is directed towards the reader and motivated by the desire to explain the apparent mystery of how such an unenterprising individual could perform such an abominable act. The confession, which was published in 1894, is an in-depth exploration of self in fiction in which no detail is spared in the search to uncover the forces at work on the character of Termeer. He was already shy and withdrawn as a child, with a highly-strung father who ends up in a mental institution, so there is a suggestion that his neurotic behaviour is to some extent inborn. On the other hand, the parents never showed their only son any love and affection, so nurture, or rather lack of it, also plays a part. The shyness increases until Termeer becomes a real loner with such a lack of self-esteem that it is a mystery how he ever married at all. From the outset it is clear that the marriage to Anna will be unhappy, and what fascinates the reader is Emants’ depiction of the gradual and complex slide towards the suitably cowardly form of murder in which Termeer on impulse pours chloral down his sleeping wife’s throat. There is a complete absence of melodrama, so concentrated is the narrative on Termeer’s inner life.


One mystery still remains once the tale is told: why is the confession posthumous? Perhaps he did go to his mistress and reveal the truth and paid the penalty, perhaps he committed suicide, or perhaps as he himself suggests, writing it all down will help him keep the secret until he dies.

My wife is dead and buried.

I am alone at home, alone with the two maids.

So I am free again. Yet what good is it to me, this freedom?

I am within reach of what I have wanted for the last twenty year (I am thirty-five), but I have not the courage to grasp it, and would anyhow no longer enjoy it very much.

I am too frightened of anything that excites me, too frightened of a glass of wine, too frightened of music, too frightened of women; for only in my matter-of-fact morning mood am I in control of myself, sure that I will keep silent about my deed.

Yet it is precisely this morning mood that is intolerable.

To feel no interest — no interest in any person, any work, even any book — to roam without aim or will through an empty house in which only the indifferent guarded whispering of two maids drifts about like the far-off talk of warders around the cell of a sequestered madman, to be able to think, with the last snatch of desire in an extinct nervous life, about only one thing, and to tremble before that one thing like a squirrel in the hypnotic gaze of a snake — how can I persevere to the end, day in, day out, in such an abominable existence?

Whenever I look in the mirror — still a habit of mine — I am astounded that such a pale, delicate, insignificant little man with dull gaze and weak, slack mouth (a nasty piece of work, some people would say) should have been capable of murdering his wife, a wife whom, after all, in his own way, he had loved. (p. 7, tr. J.M. Coetzee)