The doctor called to the scene of Christiaan Dudok's suicide pronounces it to have been "painless". An interrogation of whether or not this is true  not literally but existentially  underpins the rest of this short but satisfying novel. A life spent accepting other people's choices  his father's career path, his girlfriend's determination to marry him  has rendered Dudok numb and withdrawn. But his sense of alienation was present from childhood, in idyllic holidays on his grandfather's farm where he relinquished the bliss of truly feeling alive because he "didn't belong". As much a sustained character portrait as a novel of love and war, the book examines the choices made by such a man as Chris  diffident, cautious, responsible. It is in the matter of Julia, a fearless free spirit whom he encounters in Nazi Germany, that his core personality is most tested, most tempted to act out of character. The choice he makes colours the rest of his life  as we see in a sequence of memories beautifully linked together by the images drifting through the mind of a man waiting to die.