The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Leon de Winter's VSV (of Daden van onbaatzuchtigheid).
A couple of years ago Adam Kirsch, in his review of God's Gym, wonders why he'd never heard of this author before, as:
De Winter figures in the book too -- carrying on the long tradition of real people in works of fiction --, maybe not a selling point, given his continuing American obscurity (outside reactionary think-tank circles (he was a Hudson Institute fellow) -- yeah, admittedly that can't help ...). Amusingly, he has himself divorced from real-life wife Jessica Durlacher in the book (whose American profile -- she's written a bunch of books too ... -- is even lower than her husband's). Despite widespread unfamiliarity with their creative work, they've gotten quite a bit of press for their recent Anne Frank-play (see, for example, The New York Times' report) -- but that seems unlikely to help get more of their fiction published in the US.
VSV isn't a book I'd say has to or even should be translated, but de Winter has written enough that's good and entertaining enough that he really should have established himself in the US/UK market by now -- as he has in, for example, German translation. [The Germans -- or at least his (and Durlacher's) publisher, Diogenes -- may, however, be taking their besottedness a bit far: sixteen-year-old daughter Solomonica's Die Geschichte von Blue (translated 'from the American' -- before it's appeared in the American ...) is coming out there this fall.] It's really rather baffling why he hasn't been able to make greater American inroads; it also must drive him absolutely nuts -- embracing (certain, generally what would be considered 'conservative') American ideals and spending quite a bit of his life here he has failed about as miserably and completely as would seem possible in his adopted half- (and ideologically nearly whole-) homeland, both as a filmmaker and as a writer (while back home he's a major public intellectual and widely read novelist).
(All that said, the backlog of Dutch (and Flemish) authors US/UK publishers need to get to before they should even think about bothering with the likes of de Winter (whose works I do like -- I'm happy to pick up every new offering) is a long and terrible/impressive one, from more works by Willem Frederik Hermans and Gerard Reve (the basics !) to A.F.Th. van der Heijden and J.J.Voskuil. Hell, there are still piles of Harry Mulisch and Hugo Claus to get to ..... Get to them, folks !)
A couple of years ago Adam Kirsch, in his review of God's Gym, wonders why he'd never heard of this author before, as:
de Winter, a Dutch Jew, seems like a natural for the American market, and especially for American Jewish readers. Not only does he divide his time between Holland and Los Angeles -- where God's Gym is set -- but he has been called, by a Swiss newspaper, "an American among the European writers," for his ability to use mass-market genres to explore political ideas.Five years later, de Winter remains no less obscure -- this is the seventh of his novels under review at the complete review, and yet another one not translated into English. And that despite the reasonably sensational subject matter, beginning with Theo van Gogh in the afterlife .....
De Winter figures in the book too -- carrying on the long tradition of real people in works of fiction --, maybe not a selling point, given his continuing American obscurity (outside reactionary think-tank circles (he was a Hudson Institute fellow) -- yeah, admittedly that can't help ...). Amusingly, he has himself divorced from real-life wife Jessica Durlacher in the book (whose American profile -- she's written a bunch of books too ... -- is even lower than her husband's). Despite widespread unfamiliarity with their creative work, they've gotten quite a bit of press for their recent Anne Frank-play (see, for example, The New York Times' report) -- but that seems unlikely to help get more of their fiction published in the US.
VSV isn't a book I'd say has to or even should be translated, but de Winter has written enough that's good and entertaining enough that he really should have established himself in the US/UK market by now -- as he has in, for example, German translation. [The Germans -- or at least his (and Durlacher's) publisher, Diogenes -- may, however, be taking their besottedness a bit far: sixteen-year-old daughter Solomonica's Die Geschichte von Blue (translated 'from the American' -- before it's appeared in the American ...) is coming out there this fall.] It's really rather baffling why he hasn't been able to make greater American inroads; it also must drive him absolutely nuts -- embracing (certain, generally what would be considered 'conservative') American ideals and spending quite a bit of his life here he has failed about as miserably and completely as would seem possible in his adopted half- (and ideologically nearly whole-) homeland, both as a filmmaker and as a writer (while back home he's a major public intellectual and widely read novelist).
(All that said, the backlog of Dutch (and Flemish) authors US/UK publishers need to get to before they should even think about bothering with the likes of de Winter (whose works I do like -- I'm happy to pick up every new offering) is a long and terrible/impressive one, from more works by Willem Frederik Hermans and Gerard Reve (the basics !) to A.F.Th. van der Heijden and J.J.Voskuil. Hell, there are still piles of Harry Mulisch and Hugo Claus to get to ..... Get to them, folks !)