What I’D Rather not think about by Jente Posthuma

What I’d rather not think about by Jente Posthuma

Dutch fiction

Original title  Wear Ik Liver aniet aan denk

Translator Sarah Timmer Harvey

Source – personal copy

When the Booker International longlist came out I looked at the books, most I had a vague awareness of . But I read the small blurb on each and then set out on which order I’d read the longlist in part of this was decided by the arrival of the books on the longlist. This was one that I felt I’d get on with I love works told in Vignettes for they can work like a patchwork slowly building the picture of the book as a whole. Jente Posthuma’s first novel People Without Charisma was well-received and was up for several prizes in Holland when it came out. This is her second novel and deals with twins and the aftermath of when the older twin kills himself from his sister’s point of view.

MY Brother called himself one and Me two because he had been born forty-five minutes earlier than I was on a sweltering day in August. He treated me like his little sister, was longer and heavier than me at birth, and had taken up almost all the space in my mother’s belly. I’d been stuck behind him with my left leg thrown over my shoulder, or so the story goes. This was why it took a little extra time for me to emerge. Our actual due date had been a month later but my brother had gone ahead, and I wasn’t about to be left behind.

The fact that we weren’t identical was something I’d long considered a handicap, a consequence of our premature birth, even once I understood the difference between identical and fraternal twins. We could have grown even closer in that ninth month.

The names they used no identical but so close.

As many of you may know my own wife had to deal with the loss of a sibling to suicide it is one of the most heartbreaking things that can happen to a family and this is what ai had hoped to find here. But in a way I not sure if number two as we come to know her as the younger of the twins by some 45 minutes. There is a nod in a way here too the Twin Towers she says he was taller than me and always on the side like the Twin Towers. I felt this is written just after her brother has gone it jumps from their childhood, the discovery of each other sexuality. During those early relationships then her brother settles with a man and has a pair of dogs or as he calls them three and four. Things aren’t what they seem and in her brother’s case there always seems to be that dark spectre over his life. She maybe shows this at times with a lack of emotion I felt but that is maybe from my own personal experience of someone dealing for years with this grief.

The first sweater I bought with my own money was nice and warm and made of Icelandic wool. It wasn’t as soft as some of the sweaters I’d buy once I started working at the vintage shop, when one of my bedroom walls would gradually disappear behind a mountain of wool. I hung shelves from the floor to the ceiling and filled them with piles of sweaters, which, just like my father’s biscuit tins, were sorted according to colour. By my twenty-seventh birthday, I owned 142 sweaters, and it was high time I saw a therapist. What will you do with them all, my friends would say.It’s a collection, I’d tell them. I didn’t have any pets, so I stroked my sweaters whenever I had nothing else to do.

Two has her own issues as you see here.

I said I like vignettes as a style of telling stories and it does work here . I felt sometimes the fact it wasn’t from a real-life experience showed. There is a certain way of remembering and thinking of that event and then not happening the way when you are left after a suicide you always question the reasons motivation and what you as a sibling could have done differently. For me that is what was missing here maybe it is meant be just after he has died two thinking before the full horror or of the tidal wave of grief hits the sibling. I felt it had captured some of this but was maybe not realistic enough for me as someone who has been up in the night after night with my own darling wife as she had nightmares and questions about her own brother’s death. [art of the reason I read this early on is I wanted it to be read and gone as a book if that made sense well it does to me as the reader. Have you a subject you’d prefer not to read books around? or something that has effect your life and you find is never quite captured, right in fiction ?

Winstons score – B Well written but I just quite didn’t get it as a subject for me

A childhood by Jona Oberski

A Childhood by Jona Oberski

Dutch autobiography

Original title – Kinderjaren.

Translator – Ralph Manheim

Source – Library book

I have over the last few years always try and put a book up for Holocaust Day . I had found this in the Library I do have a couple more on my shelves but there is always a feeling over time that there are fewer books about the Holocaust being talked about. I have Primo Levi on my shelves but he isn’t spoken as much as he once was. Anyway, this is a memoir about a Dutch boy. Jona Oberski was that Dutch boy who grew up with a new family after he lost his parents through the Holocaust. Anyway, he grew up to be a Nuclear Physicist. But in the mid-70s he attends a poetry writing class with the Dutch poet Judith Herzberg where he started to recount the events he saw as a child when he lost his family in the Holocaust.

“Aren’t you going to unwrap your presents?”

I looked at my father. The colours of the things on the table were reflected in his eyes. I gave him a kiss on the nose. That made him laugh.

“Don’t you want to see your presents?” He wanted to put me on the floor, but I was so comfortable just as I was. I had one arm round his neck and I held him tight.

“All this is for you.” My mother smiled at me and pointed at the table and kissed me. She picked up a red package, began to open it, and asked me to help her. While she held the package, I tried to get the paper off with one hand. It tore.

There is a real tension underneath this piece of his birthday, I was reminded of the last birthday in Anne Franks’s diary.

We see the events of the Holocaust through a very young boy’s eyes.  How it affected the young Jona in a series of snapshots. The power of this book is how he captured the voice of the child. Those few memories we all have have captured her the events before the view of the family life in Amsterdam as a Jewish Family as the world around them is heading towards madness. He has a birthday but the way he describes it and the sense his parents know this is the last proper birthday they may all have together. When he hears his parents crying. Then when they finally head to the camps he and his mother are split from his father. But she is a resourceful woman and manages to find a way for the three of them to end up together for what would be the last time. He is in Bergen Belsen seeing the horrors but a chance event meant he luckily was able to live and write his own story.

My father was gone a long time. Somebody closed one of the wagon doors. My mother got up and stumbled to the door. She leaned out and yelled my father’s name. She yelled that the door had to be left open. She pointed and sang out: “There he comes.” She pulled my father in and other people helped. They all fell in a heap. They shut the other door. It was dark. I asked if they were coming over to me. My mother said:

“We’ll come as soon as we get used to the darkness.” Light came in through the cracks. Somebody tugged at the sliding doors but he couldn’t get them open. My mother sat back down on the bundle.

One of the last times he saw his father when the got to the Camp.

I missed bits f this book as it is a short book touching with a tine that has that child-like view of the world I am a fan of when writers get that childlike view of the world right and this is the case here a young boy seeing the horrors unfold but not knowing why. The parents cry but he isn’t quite sure why. It’s about the way they get treated as their world is changing.  His father’s world changing. Then on the camps and how he is just with his Mother, she shields him as best she can. That last time they are all together. This is a short book but powerful There is a quote from Alan Sillitoe called this the book of the century. I wouldn’t go so far but I am always in the belief that Holocaust literature should be read in schools. Also, it is worth going to Beth Shalom The national Holocaust Museum and centre which is near Newark I have a couple of times. A place of remembrance. Have you a book from a Holocaust survivor you Like? I won’t score this book, I never do this type of book the are just so important and need to be promoted and read. Our candle

The Rider by Time Krabbé

The Rider by TimKrabbé

Dutch fiction

Original title – De Renner

Translator – Sam Garrett

Source – Library book

This is one of those books that had been on my radar since the early days of the blog, I think one of the old book blogs, I Loved Back Then Parish Lantern or Inside Books, must have reviewed this Dutch masterpiece and I have seen it on the list of the best books around cycling, and I have long followed the tour de France and kept an eye on cycling so I knew one day I would read Tim Krabbé’s book. The writer himself was a competitive cyclist he had raced in France so the route he described in the book is one he would have known. Krabbé is also a well-regarded chess player and writer around chess if you follow road cycling for a long time you’d know there is a chess-like quality to making the right move and positioning yourself for the win. He came from a creative family and has written many novels he also wrote a huge 800page work of nonfiction called Friends, a chronicle about the kidnapper and murderer Ferdi Elias, who he had grown close to his wife in writing this book. A number of his books have been turned into films. This was made into a Dutch film and a less successful US film

Kléber is standing in front of me. We greet each other. I point to his bars. ‘New tape?’

He smiles apologetically. ‘For morale

Kléber is my regular training buddy. The two of us checked out the course together. We both like long races with lots of cols. But he rides for Barthélemy’s team, and sticks strictly to that during the competition.

I’m standing at the back, but it doesn’t matter. I used to think it never mattered. Until race number 145, on August 31, 1974. It was my first really long road race in the Netherlands, the Four-River Tour. A race over 175 kilo-meters, I figured, so there’s no hurry. We rode at a snail’s pace through the streets of Tiel, behind the race director’s car. Twenty-wide the riders rode, curb-to-curb, without a single gap to move up into. Strange, I thought.

One of the cyclist he knows during the race

The book is set on a single day and is in the mind of a cyclist called Tim Krabbe as he is about to do the one day Tour de Aigouat, a single-day race in France, this has also been used as a stage twice in the tour de France a race with five cols on the route (Hills), and the book describes his thoughts of the race on each kilometre but also those around him, as well as him remembering, his own cycling career. We follow his races over the years the wins, the losses, the cyclists he has ridden with the conditions and places. There is also a few nuggets of cycling history from the greats like Jacques Anquetil, who had a habit of moving the water bottle of his bike to his back pocket at the start of every climb was asked why by one of his Dutch Liutenants ask him why he did this ritual. Then we have the sad tale of Tom Simpson, the British rider who died on one of the stages of the Tour de France. As the race continues, he talks about cyclists around him, the ones he knows he calls by their names and what they do in situations like this. That chess-like quality iof cycling the player 9cyclist know each other, but when he doesn’t, he refers to them by their team jerseys (I had to check the teas as they are older teams from before my time he used the real times of the late seventies when the race is set. As the race gets near the end, we see he is doing well, and his mind of Tim turns to how to win the race.

My sporting career: 1958

A Dutchman had won the Tour! It was Charly Gaul. In fact he was a Luxembourger, but he rode in the combined Dutch-Luxembourg team, and in Paris I had personally seen him enter the Parc des Princes. I was standing outside, by the gate, and the whole peloton came in as one. I looked for the yellow of Gaul, saw it flash by and noted his look of satisfaction.

One of the sections that he remebrs his cycling life and cycling history as well here

This book has captured how we all are when we ride, even if it is just for fun I don’t cycle as much as I had done. There was a period when I lived in Germany, I cycled every day, and that is how your mind is you are thinking about various things at once. took me back to the regular cycle I did in the Netherlands from Germany. I think he has captured the nature of cycling I said I have watched the Tour in particular since the late 80s, and I am aware of the chess-like nature to cycling, watching those other riders and how each day has twists and turns and they watch each other as that one move can changer a day just like in chess. I have only read one other novel which had cycling at its heart, and that was another Dutch novel that used Ventoux the great stage finish and climb as a location for two cycle rides a year apart. But this one just captures the peloton and how it feels to be a racer and how it is to be a great cyclist but in a pack of great cyclists, just be ordinary like most of the cyclists in the peloton thsere are only a few Anquetil, Merckx etc. This deserves the title of the best cycling novel as it is, but it is also like a thriller in the way it unwinds as the kilometres drop. This reminds me to get some of those backlist books I must find and read.

Winston score ++++ A. This is one that has gone straight into my all-time favourite books.

533 A Book of Days by Cees Nooteboom

533 A Book of Days by Cees Nooteboom

Dutch Non-Fiction

Original title – 533: een dagenboek

Translator – Laura Watkinson

Source – Personal copy

I featured an Interview with Cees many years ago on the blog. I haven’t had many interviews recently, and I love getting insight from a writer. This is the fifth book from Cees I will have reviewed. He is one of those great writers that can write across various styles of writing poetry, fiction, and travel writing, and this is something of a memoir of his life and those books he has consumed over the years and the writers he has known all and a love of literature that shines through this book. This is a book compiled over years of his summer vacations in Menorca. Another of the books I read by him was his lament every year when he had to move. This is him in the summer mulling over memories of his years of writing and the writers he has encountered. He is. writer that should have won the Nobel by now one of the great voices of his nation.

Literary politics (such a thing exists: hegemonies, influences, triumvirates, legacies) and death. Elias Canetti (“The Prophet Elias [Elijah] defeated the Angel of Death. My name is becoming increasingly uncanny to me.”) on Thomas Bernhard. He claims him for himself but is afraid he will have to surrender him to Beckett. “I elevate him to my student and of course he is that, in a much deeper sense than Iris Murdoch his former lover], who changes everything into pleasantness and light and has essentially become a clever and engaging entertainment writer. For that reason alone, she cannot be a real student of mine, because she is obsessed with sexuality. Bernhard, on the other hand, is, like me, obsessed with death. Recently, how-ever, he has been under the influence of a man who puts my own in the shade, namely Beckett. Bernhard’s hypochondria

I love his thoughts on Bernhard !!

The book comprises several Vignettes that see Cees looking back on his life or, over time, talking about the catus in his garden that all have names. So he recounts things like Canetti’s death and how Thomas Bernhard was obsessed with death . Then we see how a walk on the Island connects him to god as he did it. This is a book that collects his thoughts a lot about plant and how Yucca leaves looks like Daggers. Then we have pieces around the night sky. Thoughts around Finnegans wake ( a book that I have yet to tackle and always love people’s view of it ) He then has a section around Hungarian writers which mentions Count Banffy, who I have read the first part of his trilogy. Then Peter Esterhazy and his epic novel Celestial Harmonies, a book that has been unread on my own shelf for far too long. In a later piece, he mentions Miklos Szentkuthy, another writer who has been on my radar for too long. Witold Gombrowicz is a writer who has a lot to say about as well as so many of the writers that were and are around as he has been a writer. This is one of the significant figures of European literature writing every summer over his many years in his villa in Menorca.

 

As I write on, Gould, in 1981, plays sonata number 42 as an illustration of Szentkuthy’s proposition: the difference between that sonata and my cactus is the difference between the classical-rational structure of a “work” on the one hand, and biological forms (my cactus – as I am writing this, I see him before me as though I were looking into my garden in Spain) on the other. “My own writings for the time being,” says Miklos Szentkuthy, “belong to the cactus category: if I can have a role in literature it is the direct tangibility of biological lines and forms of instinct in my sentences. ‘Experimental novel’ was said about Prae in more than one place, by which one was supposed to understand an anachronistic relic of the old-fashioned mood of the roth century.” Prae, in spite of the huge reputation that the book has in Hungary, has been translated into few other languages, which prompts both suspicion and curiosity.

Prae is one of those books I must read at some point !!

I am a massive fan of Cees. I should read him more often, but he is a writer I want to have books left from, but in this book, he reminds me as a reader of those books still out there to discover and made me think of how underread I am in some areas of my reading. I love books like this, a glimpse into a great writer’s mind and workings and musing. He does mention writers’ diaries in passing; at times, this isn’t a diary but more a collection of moments and thoughts caught over time, a lifetime from those early days of his as a writer, his debut novel, which I have yet to read. I also love the talk of his planets and his garden as someone who isn’t a gardener but hopes to get some great plants in my new garden (well, when my rear lawn is laid ). This is hard to pigeonhole as it covers so many different subjects it just needs to be read !! Have ypu read any books by Cees ?

Winston’s score +A – I love a book that spurs me on as a reader to read more and discover more !!

The Leash and the Ball by Roddaan Al Galidi

 

 

The Leash and The Ball by Rodaan Al Galidi

Dutch fiction

Original title – Holland

Translator – Jonathan Reeder

Source – Review copy

As the year is beginning to unfold, there is a theme of migration and being a refugee forming. Here is another book that fits in that box from the dutch Iraqi writer Rodaan AlGalidi he fled his homeland to evade national service. Initially, he failed to get asylum in Holland, so he didn’t have Dutch lessons, but he has taught himself Dutch since the early 200o and published several novels. He has won the EU prize for literature for his book the ausist and the carrier pigeon. This book follows a similar journey to his own life and the narrator in his novel’s life, and that is the tightrope of becoming a citizen that is similar in most western countries.

You cannot compare a Dutch village to an Iragione. Whereas in Irag the dogs lie in wait in order to bite you, in a Dutch village it’s the solitude that lurks. To me, the word village means “factory for fruit, vegetables, meat, eggs, and soldiers” (since village children in Irag do not go to school, the boys enlist in the army at eighteen). In a Dutch village you see tractors and barns, fields of potatoes, carrots, and on-ions, but not a single Dutch person sweating out in the fields, chasing his neighbor’s cattle from his orchard, or struggling to coax more water out of the ground. It’s as though the village runs itself. I was surprised to discover that even the smallest village in the Netherlands has a supermarket, where to my even greater surprise you can buy all sorts of fruit and vegetables without seeing the trees they grow on, or those trees having the climate they need.

Culture shock sinks in with Samir compares his dutch village to his former home at Iraq

 

The book follows the final part of their journey to become dutch citizens, Samir and his chance to start his new life as a dutch citizen. He like the writer himself tried to escape conscription into the Iraqi Army. He made that journey into Europe via southern Spain and ended up in Holland; he has been there for nine years; he is a qualified engineer like the writer himself. Alongside all this, a failed love affair with a dutch girl called Leda crops up again and again throughout the book. He tries to fit in the village he lives in by wandering with a lead and ball given by Leda and pretending he has a dog to meet people as we see the places unfold the places to places the asylum centre. The villages and places. He is a grafter. He doesn’t want handouts he tries to get jobs here and there (this reminds me of working in a factory in Germany alongside some Kosovian refugees in the early 90s; this couple were a professor of Albanian Literature and her husband worked on the Albanian version of a match of the day, and they were in a factory packing. But he also worked in the local cafe in the evening as our narrator does). as Saamir tries to blend in over time he slowly does, but it shows how hard it can be.

Had Leda also told the Dutch dog that he had to be ready in ten minutes? Could Diesel tell time? Questions only I could ask, and only Diesel could answer. I rocked from one leg to the other, like a stork, until Leda appeared. She had wrapped the leash around her left hand. Her expression showed no surprise that I was standing there after all, she had invited me herself but no enthusiasm, either. It was more the look of someone who thinks, well, I did ask him to join me, but was that such a good idea?

Leda his dutch girl and dog lover.

I loved this book as what makes excellent lit for me has to connect with me on a personal level. Has to be a connection to my own lived experience and here I felt it. I worked with Refugees in the late 90s and felt a connection to Samir. His life and story remind me of those friends I made on a factory floor in Germany. Rodaan Al Galidi captures the comedy and sorrow of being a fish out of the water, trying to blend in but standing out no matter what you do. The freedom he craves is always in his grasp when he lived in the asylum centre. I have another book by this writer I hope to get to later in the year as he is a writer. I’ve a new writer I love. Have you read any of his books? A great book from world editions

Winston’s score – +A one man’s life as a refugee in Holland at the end of the Hussein years he had to escape.

We had to remove this post by Hanna Bervoets

We had to remove this post by Hanna Bervoets

Dutch fiction

Original title – Was wij Zagen

Translator – Emma Rault

Source – Personal copy

Sometimes you see a book and then forget about it and then see it again and go I should got that book that was the case with this I went through a lot of the books that were in Waterstones post Christmas sale this book is one I had nearly got at the time it came out the middle of last year. As the subject matter had appealed it appealed as there aren’t many novels yet about social media that have been translated. The job of content moderator has to be a hard one this is the seventh novel from the Dutch writer Hanna Bervoets she has a wonderful website with lots of info about the awards including one for the body of work she has written so far. she has only this book translated so lets hope she has some more books translated. She lives with her girlfriends in Amsterdam.

were given two manuals that first day, one with the terms and conditions of the platform and one with the guidelines for moderators. We didn’t know at the time that those guidelines changed constantly and that the tome we received was already outdated when it was put into our hands. We weren’t allowed to take the manuals home with us, so we learned by doing. On the first day of training, a series of text-only posts appeared on our screens, and then, from day three, photos, videos, and livestreams. Each time, the question was: Is it okay to leave this up on the platform? And if not, why not? That last part was the trickiest. The platform doesn’t allow people to post things like “All Muslims are terrorists,” because Muslims are a PC, a “protected category,” just like women, gay people, and, believe it or not, Mr. Stitic, heterosexuals. “All terrorists are Muslims,” on the other hand, is allowed, because terrorists are not pc besides, Muslim isn’t an offensive term

The first day and what makes the cut and what is unacceptable according to the company

Kayleigh has taken a job at a social media company called Hexa part of a larger company she joins a team of content moderators, that view any content flagged as inappropriate or unsuitable(in the time of Musk taking over Twitter these people’s jobs are so important or else we go down a dark path) she likes her co-workers she even falls for one of them but this book is about the group here and the drip drip effect of the content and the constant pressure of what is acceptable and not and does you over time become use top this content so you let through the content you’d not thought about letting through at the start. Alongside this is a new relationship with  Babara then she falls for Yena a mismatched relationship. The coworkers take legal action with the pressure and sheer mental health issues this job causes them and also we see how each person has their own axe to grind from. Jewish coworker that gets into arguments and another coworker who is flat earth believer all add to a book that feels far more than its 130 pages.

That night we ended up kissing for the first time. After work Robert passed around another rollie, and at the bus stop we all took a swig from Souhaim’s stylish horn hip flask, so when we walked into the sports bar around seven we were still in high spirits- in fact, we were whooping as if we’d all won in the Olympics. Inside, some people were dancing. That was a rare sight in the sports bar, but Michelle must have picked up on her clientele’s mood and had cranked up the volume on the playlist all the way.One girl from our cohort was making out with a huge guy. It took me a moment to recognize him it was John, who always wore blue gingham button-downs in the office, but who was now swaying his hips in a soaking wet T-shirt, the fabric drenched with sweat even though it wasn’t very warm inside or outside.

They go out and that shared experience that leads to them falling off each other and being friends.

This captures what it is like to be on the knife edge of what makes the cut to be ok and what is demanded unacceptable to be seen this also shows how doing that as a job can be heartbreaking and heartwrenching and also cause those doing it to feel numb to the content they are viewing. There is a part she describes a sex scene and you sense how she has seen this content so often she even knows what will happen next. This is a book that did the rounds on social media given not social media content but for me, it is an age-old job of the moderator who viewed the video nasties and checked books for content. the police that watches videos. All these people have mental health from doing this job. It also shows relationships and comradeship in these jobs and how easy it is to have relationships with co-workers from the shared experience =but then there is also the side of that yes the shared experience but there is also the person as a whole that is outside that and that is what is shown in the two relationships of Kayleigh in the book. A book that captures a hard job and the outfacing of that on one person and the group she works with! Have you read any books about social Media?

Winstons score -B A great attempt to capture the social media world and its employees.

Freetown by Otto De Kat

Freetown by Otto De Kat

Dutch fiction

Original title – Freetown

Translator – Laura Watkinson

Source – review copy

Well here is the first bi-weekly review post from me and I have chosen a Dutch Novel From the Dutch writer Otto De Kat which is the pen name of the Dutch Publisher Jan Geurt Gaarlandt a publisher of Non-fiction and someone I would love to chat with as he has published a ten-volume on world Literature now that is one book that could do with being translated into English!  I read one of his earlier books Man on the Move a few years ago and have also read a couple of others that I was sent. I decided it was time to feature him again on the blog.

Sierra Leone, yes, that was where Ishael came from. I asked him where he’d lived befpre, hoping he would say something, and to was away the thought of my rash offer.

“He held his right hand to protect himselfand keep the dog in her place. I noticed the pale palm of of his hand with its dark edges.It was a momnet before he said:”Sierra Leone”>I tried to remember exactly whereit was, that country I’d never met anyone from Sierra Leone.It was only a place on the mao for me, somewhere involving Diamonds and civil war. But that wasa long time ago, and it didn’t make the headlines anymore

The offer to live with her and her trying to think where he was from

This book follows a couple that had split up in their sixties. Maria is one of those women that has made it through the world herself. She is in her sixties but she has taken in a young boy Ishmael he is a refugee from Sierra Leone he delivered her papers and they struck up a friendship that leads to him living with Maria this goes well they get on and over time the older woman looks on this guy like her son. SO when she wakes one day not long after he has become a Dutch citizen. So she turns to her old lover Vincent a man who loved her but it just wasn’t ever right but as they start to discuss their own past but also what has happened to Ishmael, this will take Maria back to the heart of where he came from and confront the ghost of and the loss of a boy.

I visited his village, Vince, I havent been back from Sierra Leone that long. For three wees, I was in Ishmael’s homeland instead of where I said I was. I’d told Maarten I really wanted to make a trip to france on my own. That was fine by him, he was busy with his own life.

“Three weeks- it seemed – like an ocean of time.But it tricjkled away into the Landscape, into the river, into the villages, int the endless people. I’ve been back two months now, but sometimes I wonder if I was ever there at all.

“My first time in Africa, I don’t think you’ve been there, have you? I remember you saying you’re a European through and through, You thought rome was far enough, you didn’t need to go any further than that, did you ? And maybe you’re right. A white person in Africa, it’s not right. I was suddenly very aware of my colour.”

Her view of being a white women in Africa as she hunts for Ishmael.

The book isn’t what it seems the story has a refugee but this isn’t a refugee story it is a story of the two old lovers and what happens about human nature when Maria reconnects with Vincent how we see has never really got over the split between the two of them. The past that looms large as they talk over their memories about what they have been through but there is also the present looming large especially in Maria’s mind and discovering where Ishmael disappeared to what was his story. I feel this is what Otto De Kat does well in his books is talk about the inner working of what makes us all human he peels the onion skins back of the past of Maria and Vincent as we see what lead them to the point they are at now. This is often as the two characters recall monologues about their relationship But then when we see the part of the book where they discuss Africa it shows how People from European view Africa in a certain way. It is what I expect from Dutch literatur4e something that has real soul and a subtle view of the world a sort of Quiet loud that remains with me as a reader if that makes sense.This was made possible by a grant for the translation

Venice The Lion,the City and the Water by Cees Nooteboom

Venice The lion, the City and the Water by Cees Nooteboom

Dutch travel memoir

Original title – Venetië-de leeuw, de stad en het wate

Translator – Laura Watkinson

Source – review copy

I have featured three books before by the great Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, I thought it was more oh well I have a few to add at some point. He is one of my favorite writers especially his travel writing I loved his letters to Posiden the yearly ode to the Spanish Islands he has spent many summers visiting.  here we have another place that seems close to his heart Venice he has been traveling there for over fifty years and he always tries to stay somewhere new in the city and he seems to have read most if not all the novels short stories and nonfiction books around the city itself.

A first time, there is always a first time. It is 1964, a rickety old train from Communitst Yugoslavi, final destination; Venice. Beside me, a young woman, American. The long journey here left its mark on us. Everything is new. We take the city as it comes. We have noexpectations, except for those asscoiated with the city’s name, and so everything is good. It is all stored away in the secret tissue of the memory. The train, the cty, the name of the young woman. We all lose touch, lead different lives, find each other our lives, find each other again, much later in the other side of the world, tell each other our lives. More than Fifty years after, that first day, in 1964, will find its way into a story, a story called “Gondolas”.The city, everything that had vanished in the meantime, will form the backdrop for that story.

The opening remembering his first time in the city.

Nooteboom is a wander whether on foot or the vaparetto that cross the city he first arrived on from a train from Communist then Yugoslavia in 1964 he has tried to discover something new each time. The city is full of tales he talks of the old city under the Doges. The earliest writers like Boccacio describing the city. The labyrinth nature of the city from Borges’s short story of the city he explanation of the word in Dutch which has a different meaning than in English. Then many great writers that had later written about the city he tells us of James and Mann Pound and Kafka. Later he later stays in a hotel that Kafka wrote his sad letters to Felice. This is a man that loves to discover anew the city every time he drifts from Rushkin’s time in Venice. Later we are discussing Cassanova and he reminds me of the books of Miklos Szenkuthy who write a book about Cassanova which had caught my eye a while ago. He brings to life the city its ghosts and the very fabric of the place.

A friend had once, long ago, spent her wedding night here, and she would later tell methat Kafka had written his sad letter to Felice in this hotel, a letter that probably read as if it were at last. That same year he had sent her more than two hundred letters and cards, so the message in this letter must have come as a nasty surprise. He has, he writes, reached the conclusion that art and love do not go together, he fears that nothing would come of his work. He expresses it more clearly in his diary:”Coitus as puinshment for the happiness of being together. I shall isolate myself from everyone, living as ascetically as possible, more ascetically than a bachelor, that is the only way for me to endure marriage”

His visit to the Hotel that Kafka stayed in

This is a book for any lover of Lit and Venice as he brings the city to life through those writers that have written about it, I have never been to Venice but love anything to do with the city ever have since seen Michael Palin working as a bin man the recent BBC series following the everyday folk of the city. Cees is a man of book and this for me has given me a list of books to read. As travel to the city is near impossible for the moment with the coronavirus meaning travel is hard you can see the city anew and vibrant through Cees eyes his fifty years of getting lost and discovering new things all brought to life by one of my favorite translators Laura. Have you ever read Cees travel writing?  Have you a city you want to visit at some time?

The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

Dutch Fiction

original title –  De avond is ongemak

Translator – Michele Hutchinson

Source – review copy

I was pleased when this made the Booker longlist as I had already said I would review it today as part of a Bokenweek tour which I have taken part through over the last few years. I have long been a fan of Dutch lit so when the chance to review a book from one of the rising stars of Dutch Lit Marieke Lucas Rijneveld first came to notice with a poetry collection Calfskinwhich won a poetry prize. She grew up in the North Brabant area of The Netherlands where it is a large dairy farming area and religious as well. Her middle name was initially a fantasy friend when she was growing up but in her late teens, she took the name as a way to show her as an intermediate person. The discomfort of evening is her debut novel like the main character she also lost a sibling growing up.

“But he’s not dead” Mum said to the vet. She got up from the edge of the bath and extricated her hand from a pale blue flannel. She’d been just about to clean Hanna’s bottom, otherwise there was achance she’d get worms. They made little holes in the cabbage leaves. I .  was old ebough to make sure I didn’t get worms and I wrapped my arms around my knees to look less naked now the vet had suddenly come into the bathroom

The vet tells the mother it is fatal but this is the start of the world they know falling apart.

When ten-year-old Jas loses her older brother and one of her five siblings through a skating accident. At this point her world starts to fall apart.she is on the cusp of being a teen discovering her body but also struggling with the loss of her brother. From believing her family ios hiding Jews in the cellar aftermath of Foot and mouth is still felt in the community times are hard for the family these are dark times. From toads under her bed to strange events with cows on the farm Jas is trying to bring her brother back and help her siblings. As her mother stops eating and the father buries his head in the farm. Matthies is dead and they can’t mention him as the family struggles this is a portrait of a meltdown viewed from the eyes of a ten year but a ten-year-old with a weird way of dealing with her grief her self.

“How’s it going in the basement ?”

I don’t look at my mother but fix my gaze on  the floweery meadow on her apron, It’s possible that mum will move into the basement one day ; that she’ll find the family, the Jewish people that live there, nicer than us. What wikl hapopen to the three kings then, I don’t know: Dad is still incapable of evening heating up milk for coffeee. and if he lets it even tht boil over, how could he ever keep his children at the right temprature?

The family is spliting before Jas eyes.

This is a slow unravelling of a family through grief it is heartbreaking dark and mesmerizing at times. In the hinterlands of Holland, a ten year old narrates as her family falls apart from the loss of the eldest son. The parents are there but aren’t there this takes the book into a similar territory of books like lord of the flies. As Jas her sister and brother start to do thing that are strange and odd rituals touching animals touching each other as they have no outlet for their grief their actions turn. As they grapple with the cusp of adulthood and also sexual awakening tinged with disbelief at loss add to the odd world. I was reminded of Gerbrand Bakker twin in the setting a dairy farm in the hinterlands of holland also dealing with death. But this is a darker book than that was it is brutal death is never far away as anyone how has grown up in the countryside nature and farming can both be brutal at times. What are your thoughts on these books ? I reviewed this as part of a boken week tour her are the other stops

 

 

Shadow Child by P F Thomése

Shadow Child by P F Thomése

Dutch autofiction

Original title – Schaduwkind

Translator – Sam Garrett

I was out a few weeks ago when I saw this slim volume fro this prize-winning Dutch writer. I read the blurb it concerned the death of his young daughter Isa and struggling with the words to cope with this death has been so touched by the book by Carl’s book by Marie Naja Aidt which saw her coming to terms with her son’s death in his teens. I wondered the father version of the same loss would deal with it. The words on the back of the book some up the title may be “missing word. A woman who lives longer than her husband is called a widow, a man without his wife a widower. A child without parents is an orphan. But what do you call the father and mother of a child who has died ?”

We, who were no longer allowed to take our child in our arms, adapted immediately. We learned to read lips, eyebrows, fingersI eben read backs and shoulders. I read footsteps,doorsm=,silences. Later they brought in the equipment, more and more equipment, We learned to read that as well, we learned the numbers and their relationship to respiration,pulse rate, blood pressure, We learned to ignore certain beeps, and could distingush unerringly between various drips and tubes, They provide us with explanations, the only ones at our disposak. We wanted to understand everything.We sought a handheld in every fact, in order to keep from falling,.Into bottomless nothing.

I was reminded when i sat by my mothers bed as she opassed away with all the equipment around her and having the feeling of bottomless nothing.

There is a lot about the future here and the moment of loss from Pieter’ point of view a stone that had broken. As his girl drifted off from them. The future they saw is broken a book shut what wasn’t anymore.It doesn’t linger on the reason for her death what was wrong but the aftermath and the space left by Isa the trying to carry on. The betrayal in those writers he lovedNabakov and Flaubert who had both written about child deaths in the prose here, Pieter, in his vignettes feels they let him down even says in Goethe’s piece about the erlking which ends with the line But in his arms, the child lies dead. Pieter says this should have been the opening line no the closing line of the piece. The vignettes show how grief can rip your heart out as we have lived with our grief for the last year since my brother in law took his own life these words are touching and show the raw emotions of grief.

You don’t have ablank page anywhere, there’s nowhere I can get through to my own blanket ignorance. You put full stops everywhere and pull doors shut behind you (Yes, even you. Herr Gehemrat Goethe. your poem should not have ended with ” In sienen Armen das Kind war tot * ,.That’s how it should have started)

*In his arms the child was dead.

Even Goethe wasn’t a comfot of those writers he lived to read just seemed pale in the darkness.

The lines on the cover about the missing word for the loss of a child this is like carls book was a heartfelt work on personal grief and if you have grief in your own life is worth reading to show that you are not alone on the journey and the journey maybe be short or long everyone’s trip through grief. With it short chapters and drifting in time we see how Piter meditates on this moment of loss and the problems it brings to the parents of a shadow child the gulf of loss or a future never had the coming to terms and the loss of Isa her self those last days of her life that he relives from various angles and approaches. I was pleased to have found this book it came out 15 years ago here so it has been out of print for a while. But if you find a copy it will be worth reading.