Harry Mulisch, the pre-eminent Dutch novelist, has died at age 83 without having won the Nobel, which many of his admirers, myself included, thought he should have won years ago. Too late now; never mind. He was a great writer, and never needed the showy accolade of awards to prove it. I greatly admire his WW2 masterpiece The Assault, a grim tour de force whose atmosphere–provincial Holland, the Nazi Occupation, the bone-cold winter of 1944–never leaves you, indeed for me continues to define what it must have felt like in the last winter of the war. And I got delightedly lost in the labyrinth of The Discovery of Heaven, which partly inspired my own Adorations. I was excited and awed by the book's scale, erudition and ambition.

Like any true master, Mulisch never condescended to his readership and he never compromised his art, which was exquisite, austere, and rigorous from start to finish. A Dutch Master indeed.