The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Een transatlantische tragedie by A.F.Th. van der Heijden, his novel Het schervengericht.
As longtime readers know, I've always found van der Heijden an interesting author (four more of his works are under review at the complete review) and I've been a bit surprised that he remains untranslated into English -- probably the major living Dutch author who hasn't been translated. (A reasonable amount of Dutch fiction gets translated into English, but there are still surprising gaps -- major work by Harry Mulisch and Hugo Claus, a load of stuff by The Darkroom of Damocles-author Willem Frederik Hermans, not to mention almost all of Gerard Reve's work, or J.J.Voskuil's Het Bureau.) This one would seem an obvious candidate for a US publisher to take a chance on: it may be a 'transatlantic tragedy' but most of it is set in the US -- and features no less than Roman Polanski confronting Charles Manson (the man behind the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate). So, yeah, pretty sensational material, in the hands of an author who can and should be taken seriously.
Yes, it is really long -- 1167 pages in the German translation I read -- and I did find it flawed. But it won one of the highest Dutch literary awards, the (then still so called) AKO Literatuurprijs, in 2007.
It doesn't surprise me (I called it a while back) that instead the first van der Heijden that will appear in English will be the slightly less massive and much more personal/universal (and multiple prize-winning) Tonio (see the Dutch Foundation for Literature information page) -- though I am a bit surprised/disappointed that it's not a US or UK publisher that's first up in English, but rather Australian Scribe. I'm afraid this isn't really my thing -- I prefer my fiction (and non) more detached and I don't enjoy personal wallows, however tragically occasioned they may be (and this is about as tragic as it gets). Still, if it gives him a foothold into English .....
As longtime readers know, I've always found van der Heijden an interesting author (four more of his works are under review at the complete review) and I've been a bit surprised that he remains untranslated into English -- probably the major living Dutch author who hasn't been translated. (A reasonable amount of Dutch fiction gets translated into English, but there are still surprising gaps -- major work by Harry Mulisch and Hugo Claus, a load of stuff by The Darkroom of Damocles-author Willem Frederik Hermans, not to mention almost all of Gerard Reve's work, or J.J.Voskuil's Het Bureau.) This one would seem an obvious candidate for a US publisher to take a chance on: it may be a 'transatlantic tragedy' but most of it is set in the US -- and features no less than Roman Polanski confronting Charles Manson (the man behind the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate). So, yeah, pretty sensational material, in the hands of an author who can and should be taken seriously.
Yes, it is really long -- 1167 pages in the German translation I read -- and I did find it flawed. But it won one of the highest Dutch literary awards, the (then still so called) AKO Literatuurprijs, in 2007.
It doesn't surprise me (I called it a while back) that instead the first van der Heijden that will appear in English will be the slightly less massive and much more personal/universal (and multiple prize-winning) Tonio (see the Dutch Foundation for Literature information page) -- though I am a bit surprised/disappointed that it's not a US or UK publisher that's first up in English, but rather Australian Scribe. I'm afraid this isn't really my thing -- I prefer my fiction (and non) more detached and I don't enjoy personal wallows, however tragically occasioned they may be (and this is about as tragic as it gets). Still, if it gives him a foothold into English .....