The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Adri van der Heijden's Tonio: A Requiem Memoir, just out in the UK and Australia (but not, sigh, in the US) from Scribe.
Odds and ends about this:
I'm always struck how, despite how much Dutch literature gets translated into English, there are still enormous lacunae -- from Gerard Reve's De avonden, finally due out in English in a year or so, to much by the great The Darkroom of Damocles-author Willem Frederik Hermans to a whole pile of Harry Mulisch's work to J.J.Voskuil's epic Het Bureau (and Bij nader inzien, for good measure). Van der Heijden is clearly one of the most important Dutch writers of recent decades, standing out even among the very solid competition of recent years (notably Tirza-author Arnon Grunberg) and it's astonishing that a nationally acclaimed author of his stature hasn't been translated previously.
Odds and ends about this:
- The author's name is Adrianus Franciscus Theodorus van der Heijden and I can't believe he doesn't just go whole hog with that; in the Netherlands and Germany he publishes as 'A.F.Th. van der Heijden'.
(Okay, family -- including son Tonio, about whom the book is -- call him 'Adri', but still .....)
- As long-time readers know, I've been touting van der Heijden for a while -- the first review of one of his books appeared on the complete review over fifteen years ago ! -- but this is the first of his (many) books to appear in English.
- It was pretty clear to me -- as I mentioned not long after the book first appeared in Dutch -- that this was the likeliest of his books to get translated.
(The problem with most of them -- including the other strong contender, the Charles Manson-Roman Polanski novel, Het schervengericht -- is that they're often incredibly long, and even many of the shorter ones are parts of his two big novel-cycles.)
- There's a bit of name-dropping here -- and in a country the size of the Netherlands it's not surprising that it can seem that pretty much everyone knows everyone else: the oddest cameo here is a sullen six year-old Robin van Persie, encountered with his more charming older sisters on a French vacation.
I'm always struck how, despite how much Dutch literature gets translated into English, there are still enormous lacunae -- from Gerard Reve's De avonden, finally due out in English in a year or so, to much by the great The Darkroom of Damocles-author Willem Frederik Hermans to a whole pile of Harry Mulisch's work to J.J.Voskuil's epic Het Bureau (and Bij nader inzien, for good measure). Van der Heijden is clearly one of the most important Dutch writers of recent decades, standing out even among the very solid competition of recent years (notably Tirza-author Arnon Grunberg) and it's astonishing that a nationally acclaimed author of his stature hasn't been translated previously.