Neel Mukherjee of The Daily Telegraph wrote in 2007: "The novel, written in a spare, even desiccated style, becomes starkly existentialist, bringing to mind Camus and the Sartre of Les Chemins de la Liberté.

Crackling with tension at the same time as a philosophical cynicism - or perhaps just an uninterested amorality - about motives and actions, this is an edgy, uneasy novel about the human condition, effortlessly disguised as a thriller.

"[4] According to Milan Kundera, in Hermans' novel we can find a sort of "black poetry":[1] In order to eliminate a Gestapo collaborator in a secluded villa, Osewoudt is obliged to first kill two unwitting and innocent women ("if the word 'innocent' has its place in Hermans' world"), the collaborator's wife and a lady who arrives at the villa to take the couple's little boy to Amsterdam.

He drives him to the station, stays with him on the train, then in the streets of Amsterdam; the spoiled child brags about in a pointless and long conversation during which Osewoudt only listens to.

The "black poetry", for Kundera, consists in this case in the meeting of the triple murder and the prattle of an exhibitionist child.