Colm Tóibín - A Long Winter (Picador, 2025) ****

Originally part of the book "Mothers and Sons", published in 2006, "A Long Winter" has now been re-issued as a separate novella, and with reason. 

It's a great, sad and tragic story, told from the perspective of the oldest son Miquel, who lives with his mother, father and brother in a small village high in the Catalan Pyrenees. His brother has left for his military service, and his mother left the house after a family row, possibly to find her brother in a nearby village. When it starts snowing, all hope of finding her again gradually vanishes, despite the fact that search teams are set up, both officially and informally. 

"It occurred to me then, almost as a way of making that title "Mothers and Sons" more solid, that I could give all the point of view to the son. This meant that everything would be seen by him, registered by him, known by him, noticed by him, remembered by him, felt by him. However, he would not tell the story; it would not use his voice. Instead, it would use the lens and the prism of his perspective. The style would be slow, immersive, third-person intimate. The theory of this is that the reader enters into the spirit of the protagonist after a few pages and begins thereafter to see the world as though they are him, or as though they are close to him." (Afterword, p. 133)

As you can expect from Tóibín, his characters are extremely well drawn, with all their sensitivities and personalities, working with each other despite the challenge of the disappeared mother. At the same time as hope decreases, Miquel's sentiments for young males in his immediate environment rise: a young policeman who is part of the investigative team, and Manolo, a young man who comes to assist with cooking and cleaning. Tóibín masterfully describes, in a very well-paced and subdued writing, the emotions between the two young men, whose relationship grows as the snow starts melting, as the hope of finding his mother's body increases. 

It is a novella, but it's an excellent read, a little gem. Colm Tóibín makes every sentence, every action, every dialogue, every word seem precious and valuable. His language is precise, observant and despite its short length, he makes it a memorable story. 

Allard Schröder - Dood En Leven Van De Jonge Selder (Arbeiderspers, 2026) **

Door de Standaard Der Letteren (@destandaardletteren) de hemel in geprezen, heb ik me laten verleiden om deze roman van superstilist Allard Schröder aan te schaffen: "De nieuwe roman van Allard Schröder is waanzinnig in alle betekenissen van het woord : vijf sterren". Ook Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer mag een citaat geven over hoe goed dit alles wel niet is.

De hoofdfiguur, de jonge Robert Selder, komt zijn ouders opzoeken in de voorstad. Hij is student in de rechten, maar heeft zijn studies opgegeven. Hij dobbert wat rond in het leven. Wat de jongeman interesseert, wat hij wil bereiken in het leven, waar hij van houdt of wat hij haat: dat komen we allemaal niet te weten. Hij is een bordkartonnen figuur, een schets van een mens, een holle persoon van bij het begin van het verhaal. Nergens neemt Schröder de tijd om zijn personage neer te zetten, om er een mens van vlees en bloed van te maken met wie we ons kunnen vereenzelvigen. Als hij dan in dialoog treedt met anderen: zijn zus, zijn ouders, vrienden, dan is die interactie altijd artificieel, houterig, en weinig realistisch. Schröder kan dan wel een stilist zijn, maar hij slaagt er niet in zijn karakters tot leven te wekken. 

De jonge Selder wordt overhoop gereden door een auto na een feestje bij vrienden, waarna hij in een andere realiteit terechtkomt, zonder middelen of papieren. Van rijkeluiszoontje is hij plots een paria geworden, een outsider die zich dan maar in het leger laat inlijven om ten oorlog te trekken tegen een mogendheid die hij niet kent, om zich dan aan te sluiten bij het verzet. Opnieuw, veel denkwerk, veel vrije wil, veel zin voor initiatief is hier niet echt mee gemoeid, hij laat zich karakterloos meeslepen zonder enige diepgang, maar hij wil toch weer terug naar zijn luizenleventje in de voorstad. 

"Misschien werd hij als vermist beschouwd of hadden ze hem voorgoed opgegeven en hem administratief doodverklaard. Als dat zo was, bestond hij zelfs helemaal niet meer en was hij opnieuw degene geworden die hij was geweest op de dag dat hij deze wereld was binnengekomen. 

Hulpeloos keek hij door het autoraampje naar de voor­bijschietende stad en voelde zich draaierig, alsof hij zijn lichaam kwijt was, tot een kruipende angst een pijnlijk hete gloed in zijn borst verspreidde, oud vuur dat een uitweg zocht. Achteroverleunend sloot hij de ogen. Was er dan nergens een gat in de werkelijkheid waardoor hij kon ont­snappen en eindelijk naar huis kon gaan? Ergens in een grot was misschien zo'n plek of onder een hunebed of in een warenhuis of ergens in zijn hoofd? Stond er dan nergens een kier open, waardoor hij hier zou kunnen wegglippen?" (blz 271)

Maar niet alleen Schröder, ook de andere karakters worstelen met dezelfde existentiële dilemma's. Wat is leven? Hoe moeten we leven? 

"'We moeten iets doen,' zei Alberecht gapend tegen Redsel (een naam voor Selder, ook Elders genoemd, nvdr). En daarna, na een pauze: 'Ik stel voor dat we gaan leven. Weet jij hoe je dat doet? Als we jou mogen geloven, kom jij uit een andere wereld, daar we ten ze ongetwijf eld hoe dat moet.' 

Nadenkend schudde Redsel het hoofd en legde uit dat ze dat daar ook niet wisten, dat ze daar eigenlijk maar deden wat hun zo inviel, zolang ze maar geen risico liepen. De meeste mensen viel trouwens nooit iets in en ze deden dan ook nooit iets wat anderen niet deden, ze begaven zich nooit buiten de gebaande paden, want als je dat deed liep je wel risico en daar hield niemand van, het leven was al riskant ge­noeg. Iedereen droeg er buitenshuis een helm, je wist maar nooit. Voor je er erg in had, viel de hemel op je hoofd en daarvoor was je niet verzekerd. Voor de arme mensen was natuurlijk alles anders, maar die telden minder." (blz 281)

Maar het is allemaal zo oppervlakkig, zonder enige nuance, zonder enige diepgang of persoonlijk gevecht tussen emoties en rationaliteit, tussen ambitie en obstakels. 

De roman zit ook vol ongerijmdheden: hij komt Katja tegen in het begin van het boek, maar zonder veel passie, een jonge vrouw met wie hij ooit een relatie had, van wie hij zelfs niet weet wat ze doet in het leven, maar wel dat ze moeder is geworden. Zonder enige aanleiding wordt zij later in het verhaal zijn grote liefde, waar hij als een waanzinnige naar op zoek gaat. 

Schröder heeft gepoogd existentiële filosofische vragen op te roepen: wie ben ik, wat is mijn doel, wat is het leven, welk leven is echt? Er zijn veel betere romans aan te bevelen die echt diepgang hebben. Denk maar aan Milan Kundera, Saul Bellow, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jonathan Littell of uiteraard ook Kafka of Camus. Het is allemaal zijn programmatisch en zeer gekunsteld om te eindigen op een heel - opnieuw oppervlakkige - maatschappijkritische toon tegenover mensen die gaan werken om hun brood te verdienen. 

Richard Flanagan - Question 7 (Alfred A Knopf, 2024) *****

If there's an absolute must-read for this year, it's this book which defies classification. Part autobiography, part history, part an ethical treatise, part about literature itself, it's first and foremost a formidable work of literature, even if it's not fiction. Flanagan tells his own personal story about living in Tasmania, about growing up with a hearing impairment, making people think he was retarded, but a disability which led him to cherish the written language as a means of communications. It's also a brutal attack on Western 'civilisation' that exterminated the original population of Tasmania, mirrored by the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as this other horror of human invention. 

The title refers to a story by Chekhov, highlighting the absurdity of asking the wrong questions: 

"One of Chekhov's earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov's question 7 is typical: 

Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came 

that the train had to reach station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?

Who? You, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer? And why do we do what we do to each other? That's question 7. (p. 24)

 On the value of writing: 

"That's what I couldn't see then that I see now, that though it happened then it's still happening now and it won't ever stop happening, and that writing about it, that writing about anything, can't be an opinion about what happened as if it had already happened when it is still happening, still unintelligible, still mysterious, and all writing is trapped in tenses when life isn't. Life is always happening and has happened and will happen, and the only writing that can have any worth confounds time and stands outside of it, swims with it and flies with it and dives deep within it, seeking the answer to one insistent question: who loves longer?" (p. 99)

On the future of our world: 

"In any case, what remains will be a wet gravel desert amidst which will be found impoundments of dead water, ash heaps and tailings dams, charred tree stumps and open-cut holes, rusting derricks and cranes and ancillary structures, bricks and corro where women once washed in the incessant rain and the cold, so much detritus mirrored in dark, toxic puddles oozing heavy metals and acid and poisons. But of that annihilated civilisation: nothing.  

A masked owl, the last of its kind, its riddling face outlined with a heart and bisected by a murderer's beak, will spread its ermine spotted wings and leave the last tree, searching for a home now gone forever, chittering an imminent oblivion. 

We will have arrived back on Wells's time traveller's dying beach, alone, in a dimming twilight. If I were a sculptor this would be my art: rusting machinery without purpose rising out of oily scum. People might see it as beauty or meaning. But they would be wrong. It would be what remains. Nothing." (p. 149)

On his hearing impairment: 

"And now it is not Ratty or Peter, nor Cisco and Pancho, but me and my sister and most of all my mother and father who briefly shape out of the static and rain only to recede back into vaporous memory when I reach out for them. It remains for me to invent what has happened in order to hold them close a little longer. But almost immediately everything starts crumbling into confusions that muddle sweet, salted roast mutton scraps on buttery toast we ate for Sunday breakfast with a spoon of foul-tasting grenadine-coloured medicine for worms that our mother chased us around the house trying to get us to swallow; the joys of childhood with the growing pain and bewilderment of those years as my deafness grew worse, as people became harder to comprehend, and I struggled to be understood with my increasingly poor language. Only when we moved to Hobart was my condition correctly diagnosed and my hearing rectified with a series of minor operations. Without Rosebery, without its alcoholic doctor who failed to diagnose my condition leading to compounding complications, I would never have known that strange nether world of isolation and pain I did in those years of deafness, when slowly I gathered that people thought I was simple." (p.180)

On the atrocity of the Tasmanian genocide: 

"The War of the Worlds had its genesis in the attempted genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. In a 1920 interview with Strand magazine, H. G. Wells attributed the idea of the book to a remark of his brother Frank, to whom he dedicated the novel. They had been talking ''of the discovery of Tasmania by the Europeans - a very frightful disaster for the native Tasmanians." ''We were walking together through some particularly peaceful Surrey scenery. 'Suppose some beings from another planet were to drop out of the sky suddenly,' said he, 'and begin laying about them here!''' 

In the first chapter of The War of the Worlds, Wells makes the connection explicit ''Before we judge them [the Martians] too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?" (p. 220)

But the real reason of all the subjects, is the power of literature: the curious link between the book "War of the Worlds" by HG Wells to nuclear physics and to the atom bomb. 

"I only write this book that you are now reading, no more than a love note to my parents and my island home, a world that has vanished, because over a century ago another writer wrote a book that decades later seized another mind with such force that it became a reality that reshaped the world. It was a story of horror that was his fear of love, complete love without measure or boundary, and he created in its place an idea of destruction without limit. In this way, the world begat a book that would in turn beget the world. 

Without Rebecca West's kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells's book Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terri­fied and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project and without the Manhattan Project there is no lever at 8:15 a.m. on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them." (p 237, 238)

Flanagan has achieved something truly exceptional. A wake-up call for humanity - one more. It deserves to be read very widely. 

Brilliant!

Olga Ravn - The Wax Child (Penguin/Viking, 2025) ****

Danish author Olga Ravn is a master at re-inventing language and prose, as we already read in "The Employees". In "The Wax Child" her angle of approach are the thoughts by a was doll that was made by Danish noblewoman Christenze Krukow, who is real historical figure who was burned for withcraft in 1621. 

In the novel, she melted beeswax and made it look like a small human. She keeps it hidden under her arm, trying to make it come alive, she gave it eyes and ears that can watch and hear. After that, it is buried in the soil, yet its powers of observation have not diminished. It sees through time and space, offering the weird perspective as a narrator of the story itself. 

“And I was in the king’s ear, and I was in the king’s mouth, and I was in the king’s loose tooth and in the quicksilver of his liver, and did hear.”

The wax child, through magic, is connected to all living creatures, using their senses to observe 

"Whenever Karen visited the casemates to whisper with Dorte and the others, she would lay me down on the ground at the foot of the door; there, the earth would scuff me, mud would mottle me, an insect might briefly settle, a worm wriggle at my side, and as the weather grew warmer, fluff and seed would cling to my wax, and then perhaps again be taken by a wind, and spores danced in the air. But the best to talk to was a chaffinch that had made its nest in a tall tree in the castle yard, and though earth and spores had much to tell, it was the chaffinch that knew best what had happened to my mistress and her companions, and vividly, with great narrative skill, the bird passed on to me the following" 

The wax child sees how a group of women work together on a daily basis, need each other to protect themselves, and this bond, this solidarity is considered as a threat to the male world who can accuse them of witchcraft as they please, and later incarcerates and burns some of them. 

"There was Christenze and Maren. There was Dorte and Apelone. There was Mette, and someone called Elle, and Maren Pedersdatter and Margrethe Hjulmands, and the wife of Gunder Vognkarl, and there was Christen ­Knudsen's woman and an old wife from Vorde whose name was Ane or Maren, and a Mette from Klarup, Else from Mov, Bodil and Sidsel from Gudum. Maren entered with a candle in her hand and lay down upon the floor as if to give birth, and the others drew me out from under her skirts like I was a human child. And everyone laughed and sang and fell about each other, and Maren looked up at Christenze with that light in her eyes and Christenze had to kiss her. It is true that someone was meant to be stricken, that someone was meant to suffer. These fingernail parts, these strands of hair Maren had meticulously pressed into my wax foot. But first and foremost they wished tocommit to each other, first and foremost they wished to seal their association, to summon the golden servant, and now it was here, I took its place, and the women's hearts were up in their mouths, all of them opened their mouths and looked agitatedly around at each other, and in every mouth was s.een a lustrous fleshy heart, and every one did fill the room with its drumming; even I, who have no heart, felt as if my own was in my mouth, and I cannot describe the sense of joy it gave me; and the moment stretched into infinity, time dis­solved inside their circle, they took each other by the hand and began slowly to dance around me with their open heart-mouths. One after another they approached and spat into my face, and each then did swallow her heart, which slithered back into its proper place and was changed by the experience. And when Christenze's spit fell on my brow I nearly burst with arousal. The candles flickered and made it look like they were dancing upon a bonfire of shadows. They had initiated me with their spit, and they called me Elisabeth, for the fingernails and hair they had given into my foot besides their own were hers, I felt it immediately. " (p. 78)

 The contradictory thing about the novel is that it while it attacks the witch-hunts, it shows that supernatural forces are at work among groups of women, and available for their use. The magic is primarily to protect themselves rather than causing harm to others. 

"To win a trial, say these words as you tie a knot: I shall tie a knot so firm. I shall tie his tooth and tongue, his hand and foot, and innermost heart. I shall tie his tooth and tongue, his liver and lung. Yes, his speech and language too, and quite as firm as the Devil stands in Hell. My words shall grow like grass in rain. Sun and moons shall perish before my foe is proven right over me. I sow my words here on the meadow green. I wish him trouble and strife. He shall find them both and the same shall he know. In three mens name." (p. 101) 

Stylistically, the wax child speaks in an almost abstract, hypnotic, staccato style, pushed forward like breathing, like heart beats, rhythmic and musing at the same time, often also sounding like mad rantings. This requires some effort for the reader, yet it works a really beautiful effect as a reading experience. 

This will not be to everyone's taste, but it's more than worth checking out. 

Irene Solà - I Gave You Eyes And You Looked Toward Darkness (Granta, 2026) **½

Somewhere in the Catalan mountains, an old woman is lying on her deathbed. She is surrounded by all female siblings, both alive and dead. Throughout her predicament, stories bubble up in an associative and irrational sequence, as if inspired by the thought or fantasy of the moment. One of the women, Joanna, once made a pact with the devil in the hope of finding a husband. As a consequence, they now live in a demon-haunted world, not by their immediate appearance, but more by the curse that's been laid on them, resulting in many babies born with minor deficiencies. 

Solà invokes a world we no longer know, of irrationality, superstition, the inevitability of living close together with your kin, as protection against the hostile external world. Her writing is vivid, rich and passionate, but it is not my thing: potentially anything could happen in her world that is totally devoid of logic or normal human interaction. 

Olga Tokarczuk - House of Day, House of Night (Fitzcarraldo, 2025) ****½

Every book by Olga Tokarczuk is a delight, and so is this one. Like "Flights", it's difficult to call this book a novel. It's a series of short stories, musings and insights, concentrated around her house in the country, the village, its neighbours and the surrounding nature. 

There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death – with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech – was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history but a cosmology.

She writes with equal interest about the rhubarb of Marta, her next door neighbour, as about the Greek philosopher Archemanes, a teacher of Pythagoras.

A red line throughout the book is the legend of Saint Kummernis, who is depicted as Jesus on the cross, with bare breasts and a beard. The young woman had to take refuge in a convent to escape a marriage that had been arranged by her father, a baron. In sacred icons she will be portrayed with bare breasts and a beard, because actually Jesus gave her his head to redeem her body from her earthly condition and from her awe of her father.

Her life is being written by young monk named Paschalis, whose greatest desire is to become a woman. He is allowed to reside in a small separate building inside the Benedictine nunnery. 

Tokarczuk juggles with her source material, brilliantly, effortlessly, creating surprises, intellectual interest and bizarre aspects of our humanity. Her stories oscillate between reality and fiction, between the conscious and the subconscious, between legend and history. 

As I said, a delight to read. 

Safae El Khannoussi - Oroppa (Pluim, 2025) ****

Om maar even met de prijzen te beginnen: winnaar van de Libris Literatuurprijs 2025, winnaar van de Boon 2025, geshortlist voor de Hebban Debuutprijs en de Bronzen Uil, en genomineerd voor de Amsterdamprijs voor de Kunst. "De verhalen in deze roman vormen een hallucinante reis langs de culturen die het nieuwe Europa vormen. Het is een pageturner waar de urgentie van afspat.[...] Dit is Nederland, dit is Europa, dit is literatuur als het festijn van woorden en metaforen dat het hoort te zijn," zo schreef de jury van de Libris Literatuurprijs.

Dat is heel wat, en het creëert heel veel verwachtingen bij de lezer, die grotendeels worden ingelost. El Khannoussi schrijft met een aanstekelijk enthousiasme en creëert een hele reeks personages, plots en subplots in de verste hoeken van onze wereld, van Amsterdam naar Parijs, Tunis, Caïro en Casablanca. Ze beschrijft een wereld van mensen met migratie-achtergrond voor wie de plek waar ze leven niet uitmaakt: alle contacten zijn uitgewaaierd over heel Europa en Noord-Afrika, wat leidt tot netwerken van familie en kennissen. Het merkwaardige is dat deze 'subcultuur' vaak meer Europees is dan de Europeanen, die toch vaak in eigen land (of onder eigen kerktoren) blijven zitten.

Het verhaal gaat als volgt: Salomé Abergel, een gevestigde Joods-Marokkaanse kunstenares en voormalig politiek dissidente, verdwijnt op het hoogtepunt van haar carrière. Een groep buitenbeentjes, stuk voor stuk met een migratieachtergrond, raakt betrokken bij haar mysterieuze verdwijning. Hind el Arian, parttime serveerster en fulltime wietroker, moet tijdens Salomés afwezigheid op haar schilderijen passen. Irad Abergel, Salomés zoon en eigenaar van een bar in Parijs, wordt achtervolgd door het verleden van zijn moeder. En Yousef Slaoui, ook bekend als ‘De Pelgrim’, arriveert in Europa en probeert in het reine te komen met zijn daden als beruchte ondervrager in de geheime gevangenissen van Marokko tijdens de ‘Jaren van Lood’.

Maar het gaat bij El Khannoussi niet om "het perspectief van de migrant over de Europese samenleving". Nee, haar insteek is vooral literair, een zoektocht naar mensen, een zoektocht naar verborgen geheimen, en een confrontatie met het eigen Marokkaanse verleden. Ze slaagt erin de verschillende, heel persoonlijke perspectieven van haar personages tegen elkaar te doen botsen, door een caleidoscopisch beeld te geven van ineengestrengelde levens, vaak tegen wil en dank. Het boek is boeiend en goed geschreven.

En ondanks de literaire insteek, heeft het ook een sterk maatschappelijke relevantie, en - uit de mond van de beul - een kritiek op de Marokkaanse dictatuur, met haar martelpraktijken en nog altijd de onderdrukking van de Imazighen, verkeerdelijk 'berbers' genoemd.

"Dit nationale beschavingsproces, zoals ze het noemden, werd in gang gezet teneinde he·t volk te verzoenen met de barbaarse praktijken, al dan niet legitiem (maar wie heeft het over legitimiteit), van gezichtsloze bewindvoerders en hun handlangers die tientallen jaren de grofste schendingen pleegden zonder daarbij aan vurigheid in te boeten. Er werd zelfs gezegd dat men nog bedrevener was in het koste wat kost handhaven van de sociale orde, dan in de strijd tegen de Franse kolonisator. Een verzoeningspoging was alleen mogelijk door de rechtvaardigheid van Zijne Hoogheid, de troonopvolger, teneinde de gruwelijke groeikrampen van de onafhankelijke staat uit het geheugen van de mensen te wissen. 

En zo werd de nieuwe eeuw ingeluid met het gejammer van die onafhankelijken: de boeren, de stokbroodmartela­ren, de Imazighen uit de Rif, Zghanghan, Berkane, Nador, Al Hoceima, Oujda, en de Jebala in het noordwesten. On­der de zegenende hand van de troonopvolger, die tussen zijn ruziënde kinderen rust en vrede kwam brengen, trad het vaderland, met de voorspoed van zijn heilige bloedlijn,een schitterende toekomst tegemoet, vol wolkenkrabbers en aandelen, toegejuicht door een buitenzinnige menigte, de armoedzaaiers voorop, die vol bewondering hun tan­deloze bekken vergaapten aan de pracht en praal van hun Meester. Ja, die armoedzaaiers, die geslagen, gemartelde, uitgehongerde, verweesde kinderen, die wilden zich maar al te graag beklagen over de ramp die hun was overkomen. Tijdens de publieke hoorzittingen bestormden ze de hek­ken van de conferentiezalen, ze vochten om de eerste rij, streken zonder enige gene zelf s neer op de grond, gretig gevolgd door camera's. Die oubasj, maden in de zieke huid van het vaderland. Waren de Marokkanen zo onnadenkend en zulke kinderen geworden dat zij zich door de wind lieten meevoeren als een veertje, dacht Slaoui. Waren ze bereid zich publiekelijk voor een muntje en een vod hun reputatie zo te grabbel te gooien? Waren zij op zo'n dieptepunt be­land? Na jarenlange opsluiting waren het nog altijd de kin­deren en het tuig van toen. Uitschot uit Nador, Al Hoceima, Tetouan, Ksar-el-Kebir. Uitschot dat nog altijd werkloos was en van smokkel en diefstal leefde, behalve dan die vij­geneters die nog altijd onder een lemen dak tussen hun vee leefden. Ze stonden nog niet voor de leden van het comité of ze trokken hun kleren al uit om de littekens te vertonen; zonder enige schaamte vertelden ze over de vernederingen die ze hadden moeten doorstaan, een jammerklacht die hem, Yousef Slaoui, die slechts zijn brood ervan had gege­ten, zijn sigaretten ervan kocht, met zo'n walging voor de menselijke zwakte vervulde dat een latente razernij zijn verouderde spieren dagenlang tergde. Wat was dit voor ge­zicht? Was dit het toneel van de natie: een bende werkloze bedelaars? Goed, je had er een paar tussen die mooi kon­den praten, met wie ze op het commissariaat af en toe zelf s een gesprek aanknoopten omdat je van die lui nog eens wat kon opsteken, maar het merendeel bestond uit jammeren­de, in vodden gewikkelde nietsnutten, die in kluitjes naar de criminele rechtbank werden geescorteerd, waar ze, zo werd gezegd, hun vonnis knikkebollend aanhoorden. Maar de jarenlange vervolging, marteling, en, toegegeven, zelfs moord leken geen enkel effect te hebben gehad op hun hoe­veelheid: in honderdtallen drongen ze zijn televisiescherm binnen, hun gezichten gehavend als een terrein dat door ja­renlange droogte is geteisterd.    

De vrouwen, ziek van hart, met een etterende wond op de plek waar hun geslacht had moeten zitten, kamden de laatste plukjes haar van hun schedel en vormden colonnes om hun arriverende menner de hand te kussen, de hand die hun grijpgrage klauwen, hun met saliva glimmende, preve­lende lippen behendig ontweek. Hij wilde niets liever dan het televisiescherm in kruipen, om dat gejammer eens en voor altijd te smoren, die schandelijke vertoning van slacht­offerschap, dat kruiperige gejank als van een getrapte hond.  

Maar het ergste van alles was de vernederende verto­ningen die niet alleen de getuigen en de slachtoffers maar het hele volk een absoluut dieptepunt in werkten. Terwijl de alcohol zijn protesterende ingewanden lam spoelde, had Slaoui in zijn keuken gezeten, een eeuwig brandende sigaret balanceerde op de rand van de asbak, hij vloekte hard­op en likte zijn gebarsten lippen nat. Boven het gebrom van de koelkast, en het getik van de regen tegen het raam, het stoten van zijn knie tegen de lage tafel, weersprak hij de aantijgingen, maar nog vaker corrigeerde hij de bewerin­gen, lachte spottend om de onhandige beschrijvingen van de getuigen, schold hen uit voor ezels en ongeschoolde be­doeïenen. Toen de marteltechniek van het vliegtuig voor het eerst ter sprake kwam, was hij in een onbedaarlijke lachbui geschoten. Op nationale televisie werd het vocabulaire uit de clandestiene martelkamers uitgezonden: de parkiet, het vliegtuig, de hond, de kokende voeten. Woorden die hij in geen jaren had gehoord. Af en toe werden de minutieuze be­schrijvingen onderbroken door een huilbui, een interventie, de aankondiging van een nieuwe spreker. Dan liep hij naar de WC om zijn blaas te legen, of naar de koelkast om een blik­je te pakken, een boer te laten, zijn achterste van de stoel te tillen en de jeukende plek te krabben. Of naar de woonkamer te lopen, om zich heen te kijken, zich af te vragen of de men­sen die toen de opdrachten hadden gegeven dezelfde waren die opdracht hadden gegeven om een dergelijke klucht op nationale tv uit te zenden, of ze die gehavende bedoe1enen met hun rode ogen en hun tandeloze bek betaalden om het tijdperk van de slappe meute aan te kondigen. Maar bovenal verbaasde het hem dat de woorden voor het repertoire mar­teltechnieken de hoogste lagen van de samenleving hadden bereikt, van wie de gruwelijkheid overigens nergens anders waren opgetekend dan in het dubieuze geheugen van de ziekelijke gekken die op miraculeuze wijze, door de gril-lige welwillendheid van Zijne Heerlijkheid, uitgemergeld en kauwend op hun wangen, na jarenlange gevangenschap vanuit de clandestiene en afgelegen plekken van het land kwamen gekropen: de civiele gevangenis van Kenitra, de gevangenis van Laalou in Rabat, de gevangenis van Tanger, de gevangenis van El Jadida, speciale gevangenissen voor de boeren in de Rif, het martelcentrum La ferme slovak in Oujda, Asilah, Khenifra, Kasbet Tadla, Beni-Mellal, Aïn Borja in Casablanca, het concentratiekamp in Tazmamart, het kamp van Ouarzazate, het complex van Anfa, het voor­malig vliegveld van Casablanca, waar honderden pechvogels die op het verkeerde moment op de verkeerde plek waren jarenlang aan elkaar vastgeketend zaten, onder wie ook een zwangere vrouw die vastgeketend aan een vreemde moest bevallen, de Kasbah van Agdz waar ze Sahrawis en linkse extremisten vasthielden, het paleis van M'Gouna, Settat en Meknes. En dan had je nog het detentiece11trum Derb Mou­lay Cherif, een in Temara, Dar el Mokri, je had er zelfs een onder het Jama el Fna-plein in Marrakech. Om maar niet te spreken van de gestichten waar tussen de kwijlende, hallu­cinerende, delirante gekken, de praatzieke studenten lang­zaam de waanzin in werden gedreven, net zo lang totdat ze niet meer wilden vertrekken. 

Ze hadden gelachen. Ze hadden gelachen toen Hadj Kaddouri, de hoofdcommissaris, naar de Verenigde Naties afreisde om namens Marokko tegenover het comité tegen faltering elke vorm van marteling te veroordelen, maar die tijdens de zitting herkend werd door een van de mensen die hij had gemarteld. Ze hadden gelachen om de promotie van een rechter, die in de zaak van 1977 tientallen demonstran­ten tussen de ratten en de luizen liet verpieteren in de ge­vangenis maar nadien promoveerde tot hoofdrechter voor de mensenrechten in het land. Stiekem had Slaoui zich op iets dergelijks verheugd, maar een promotie bleef uit, en hoe langer hij tegen de verveling probeerde te vechten, hoe meer zijn collega's het zwaarste werk aan hem toevertrouw­den. Hij had zelfs geen salarisverhoging gekregen."

Om dit te kunnen schrijven, woon je best niet in Marokko, een land met een heel duistere geschiedenis, met ook vandaag nog een heel bedenkelijke rechtstaat. Deze passage deed me denken aan Multatuli's aanklacht tot de heren van Lebak in Max Havelaar. De roman is meer dan een roman. Het is ook een aanklacht. Het is ook een historische achtergrond die wij als Europeanen moeten kennen om onze medeburgers met migratie-achtergrond echt goed te kunnen begrijpen. Wie meer info wenst over de martelkamers van Marokko, raad ik ook "Notre Ami Le Roi" aan van Gilles Perault. 

Het is pas enkele dagen geleden dat tienduizenden probeerden asiel te krijgen door naar Ceuta te zwemmen. Dit zegt genoeg over de toestand in het land. 

Ik heb persoonlijk het plezier gehad om een aantal jaar in Marokko te wonen, onder andere tijdens de Broodopstand van 1984, toen de hele Rif in opstand kwam, tot zelfs in Taza toe, waar ik woonde, aan de grens van het Atlasgebergte. Er waren tientallen doden in Nador en Al Hoceima, en bij ons werden de school en de straten bezet door het leger, en was er een samenscholingsverbod en elk verzet werd in de kiem gesmoord. Er waren geen kranten, en om te weten wat er echt gaande was, moesten we bellen naar onze familie in België. 

Ik hoop dat Safae El Khannoussi nog veel mag schrijven en nog veel succes mag kennen. 

Ben Lerner - Transcription (Granta, 2026) ***

The book's title refers to the recording of an interview, and its transcription for a magazine. The interview is being recorded by the anonymous narrator. Thomas, the interviewee is his German ninety-year old mentor and polymath. Prior to the interview, the narrator drops his phone in the sink, so now he cannot record the interview, yet he tells the interviewee that is being recorded. It's bizarre that his phone is broken, it's bizarre that this should prevent him from interviewing even.

In the second part of the book, we are in Madrid, where the narrator has to confess to some of his colleagues and friends that he reconstructed the interview from memory, which is received by them as being unethical and they accuse him of being dishonest. Again, how bizarre is this? How many interviews have been done without recording devices? Nobody ever accused the journalist or interviewer of dishonesty.

In the third part of the book, he meets Max, a friend and the son of Thomas, and they discuss disease and the eating disorder of the narrator's daughter. As a patient advocate, I especially liked this paragraph on how the medical world looked on his daughter's condition. 

''Needless to say we sought advice. (...) The advice was: back off, no child ever starves herself to death. The advice was: intervene immediately, get her on growth hormones, these are crucial years. The advice was: if she wants junk food, let her have it: go to McDonald's twice a day. The advice was: you must form healthy lifelong habits now, avoid the hormones and chemicals in junk, that's more important than her weight. The advice was: she's a happy kid, don't make things bigger than it is, no therapy, do not pathologize. The advice was: this must be displaced anxiety or trauma, she must be suf­fering, something must have happened at school, get her in therapy now. We had no sense of what she might be 'express­ing,' if anything, with her eating or not eating; we asked Emmie every imaginable question, but asking questions seemed to make it worse, more pressure. And I can't emphasize this enough: she was a smart, social, generally happy kid who played all day, slept well, had only the normal sea­sonal illnesses. And while she was always a bit smaller than the other kids, you wouldn't have thought: There is some­thing wrong with this girl" (p. 82)

"Transcription" is well written, multi-layered and critical of modern technology. At the same time, I find the behaviour of some characters a little too programmatic, too much puppets in the author's agenda. Mixed feelings after reading it.  

Jacob L. Wright - Why The Bible Began (Cambridge University Press, 2024) ****

Among the best books on the Bible that I've read, together with "The Bible Unearthed" by Israel Finkelstein & Neil Asher Silberman, "And Man Created God" by Selina O'Grady, "God - An Anatomy" by Francesca Stavrakopoulou, and many of the books by Bart D. Ehrman. 

Jacob L. Wright is an American biblical scholar currently serving as professor of Hebrew Bible at Emory University. Prior to this, Wright taught at the University of Heidelberg (Germany). His areas of expertise include Biblical Archaeology.

In "Why The Bible Began", he explains the need for the weak tribes living between the superpowers of Mesopotamia and Egypt to build strength by uniting what was not united, a mixture of tribes fighting each other on the small land bridge between Asia and Africa. Judah in the south and Israel in the north needed a narrative that would give them a single story, as if they all descended from the same family genealogy, and as a result even today still family. Both states saw benefits in this, and consecutively they wrote what is now the Bible, adding other myths and legends, poetry and moral stories about how to live. By claiming this historical fiction, they invented a new nation, while at the same time writing a text that for the first time ever, integrated myths into a historical context. In this way they created a narrative that created unity and could mobilise the people behind a common agenda. 

"The answer is simple: even if the biblical authors had some of way of knowing about what happened centuries earlter, an account of those events would have had hardly been relevant to their purposes. They lived during, and especially after, the demise of the territorial states that emerged during the Iron Age, and what they needed was a new way of thinking about themselves. By affirming a direct relationship between a singular deity and the nation's diverse members, and by removing the institution of the monarchy from the nation's formative past, their work provided a blueprint for a new form of peoplehood, one that had the potential to unite rival populations after the downfall of their kingdoms. 

Many of the historical factors that shaped Israel's and Judah's forma­tion find no mention in the Bible, while much of what the Bible portrays in considerable detail is far removed from history. Thus, the book of Exodus depicts how the Hebrew slaves became a nation during their liberation, and especially after entering a covenant at Sinai - long before the reign of their kings. That account runs counter to what we know today about the origins of the ''Israelites,'' and many scholars today are convinced that the Bible has little, if any, historical value. Yet rather than summarily dismissing the biblical narrative as a witness to the past, we will be focusing on the divergence of history and story. Only then will we be able to appreciate the creativity, and groundbreaking contributions, of the generations of scribes who shaped the biblical corpus." (p. 49)

"The Bible's project of peoplehood grew out of the will to admit defeat, yet also the refusal to allow it to be the final word. In Lamentations and the important works that preceded it, we witness how generations of anonymous scribes denied that military might was all-determinative in world affairs, and how their denial laid the founda­tion for a new kind of political community". (p. 152)

"Thanks to this revolutionary new concept of covenant, Yhwh could now survive the destruction of his people, and that destruction could now be understood to be a consequence of the nation's collective behavior. What emerges in this new conception of covenant is a legal-rational cosmic order, with a written, public document determining the nation's fate and a transcendent deity governing history." (p. 347)

"In the end, these final generations of biblical writers made a surprising move: they incorporated books and texts that encourage their readers to challenge the teachings that they and their predecessors had developed over centuries.These circles, who shaped the final form of the canon, were convinced that pushback and testing make a system more flexible and resilient. Only when their communities questioned and evaluated their teachings would they fully appreciate both their value and their limitations. (p. 354)

"The pervasive presence of defeat is an important clue to the enigma of the Bible's existence. It suggests that the most formative time for biblical literature was the period following the destruction of the kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, the decades leading up to the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE, and especially the centuries thereafter, during which new communities re-emerged in both the North and the South.  

The flourishing of two kingdoms was, to be sure, a necessary precondi­tion for the development of biblical literature. By consolidating disparate groups with unified calendars, festivals, music, law, cult, and language, the palace created new occasions for writing. But if the kingdoms of Israel and Judah had continued to grow and expand, and their members had not suffered long and painful experiences of political weakness and subjuga­tion, scribes would have never produced a body of writings capable of creating and sustaining a new nation. 

By reminding their audience of the destruction and suffering that their ancestors witnessed - especially after things had started to take a turn for the better - Lamentations and other biblical writings issue a warning: place your hope not in ephemeral kingdoms but in something more enduring. That something is not heaven or a new earth but belonging to a people whose members are committed to each other and to the deity who dwells in their midst. In the coming chapters, we examine how this project of peoplehood took shape in the centuries after Judah's defeat. (p. 151)

This not only results in the story as collected and written by Judean scribes or as developed by Israeli scribes, two other narrative traditions also emerge: the people's story that focuses on the collective of the nation, and the palace story, which focuses on the genealogy of power and the rights to rule the nation. These four elements to a large extent explain the many contradictions in the Bible, because they were all assembled with different perspectives and agendas. 

The whole concept of superiority as a people keeps conflicting with their military losses against neighbouring tribes. From God's perspective, this could be the externalisation of their weakness, of worldly forces versus cosmic power. The moral weakness of the ancestors, including their lack of faith and loyalty to their God, is demonstrated by their real earthly weakness now. If this is their own fault, it means that they can also gain control over their own fate by being faithful to their god and its religion, turning away from their weakness as a people. In this way, weakness becomes a foundation for superiority, to be seen as the "chosen people" by God. 

Absolutely essential reading for anybody with an interest in the Bible. 

Brenda Navarro - Eating Ashes (Oneworld, 2026) ****

Brenda Navarro is a Mexican author born in Mexico City in 1982. She studied sociology and economy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She then went on to study a Master's degree on gender and citizenship at the University of Barcelona. She currently resides in Madrid.

In "Eating Ashes" she tells the heart-rending story of the suicide of the anonymous narrator's brother. She is on her way back from Spain, with the ashes of her brother in her hands. She describes letting Diego’s ashes fall through her fingers, then tasting them: “I ate my brother”.

She tries to reconstruct the events leading up to his death, trying to understand, trying to explain, trying to channel grief and guilt. Both siblings were very close, left to grow up with their grandparents in Mexico, while their mother left them to live in Spain. 

"Alright, let’s have a chat. Sit. You have to be strong, because you’re all grown up now, right? Yes, yes you are. I’m going to leave and you two are going to stay, but it won’t be forever. Nothing is forever, I’ve told you that before: it’s just for a little while, then you’ll come live with me and everything will be better. No, don’t make that face, that’s exactly the face I don’t want to see you make. Do you have to cry over everything? I need to leave because, well, what am I doing here in Mexico? Yes, I know I said that the last time, but last time was different. It was different because it was different. You were different, I was different"

Nine years later, both youngsters fly to Madrid to meet their mother. Life is hard, and they try to make a living with jobs available for people with an immigration background, even if they speak Spanish like everybody else. However close both siblings are, as an adolescent Diego develops his own personality, with his own likes and dislikes, often becoming impossible to deal with, despite the fact that they need to rely on each other. 

"If you ask me what he did, or what he did to me, well, he made me grow up all at once. It caught me off guard, one day he was a little boy who obeyed and respected me, and the next day he was an unbearable jerk. He was one of two extremes, and it was hard to deal with him. I will never forget the first time he ran away from home. The memory of it makes me feel like crying: he got mad about some random thing, he and Mom started screaming at each other, and I wanted to stop him from leaving but he shoved me so hard I almost fell over. Then I tried to take his keys away, but by then he was bigger and taller than me and I couldn't. He left me there talking to myself. I remember all it took was the sound of the door closing and my stomach did a somersault. Seeing Diego leave, seeing him lose all respect for us, made me feel like throwing up. As if he had done the worst thing in the world, as if his rebellion had vio­lated something deep under the surface. That's what it really did feel like for me."(p. 145)

Every short paragraph consists of musings by the narrator, re-telling what happened, taking a different perspective, a different  angle, a different situation yet with similar and inevitable courses of events. 

Navarro is an excellent writer, passionate about her characters, with a deep level of emotions and stylistic mastership, with a well-balanced narrative that is captivating even you know it ends.  

Olga Ravn - The Employees (Penguin Books, 2020) ****

"The Employees" is a relatively unique novel. It describes a future situation, in which a few hundred statements from employees, both human and humanoid, are collected to assess the problems of production, the efficiency of workflows, and the possible remedies in the context of objects they are observing on a planet far away from ours. Through these statements, some very short, and some more extensive, we are introduced to a strange science-fiction of a dystopian future. Danish author Olga Ravn said she was inspired by the exhibition "Consumed Future Spewed Up as Present" by visual artist Lea Guldditte Hestelund. 

"STATEMENT 054  

It's easy talking to you. It feels like whatever I say is right. I speak and you write down what I say. You smile at me. I think you all look really good. I get the feeling that while you're noting things down you're also drawing me. The bio-draperies are stringy: the third and the sixth are wet, the first and fourth are shades of blue, while those from 10 to 14 are all the same colour, which changes with the ship's cycle. The second and ninth bio-draperies are red, and a wind blows through them. Some days they sway gently, other times they flap like mad. These fluc­tuations in the wind follow neither the ship's cycle nor, as far as I can make out, any other logic, at least none that we know of as yet. The fifth bio-drapery is silver, not silver silver, but a kind of transparent, glimmering chiffon, though of course it's not chiffon at all, but bio-tissue. This one, the fifth bio-drapery, is definitely the friendliest of the draperies, whereas the one next to it, the sixth bio-drapery, can't be said to express any form of personality at all and yet is the one the workers touch the least, it seems to be made out of the deepest darkness and has very little materiality at all. The eighth bio-drapery bears the closest resemblance to something  that could be familiar to us, having the same quality and appearance, even the same smell, as chocolate-coloured corduroy, a pleasant and at the same time faintly con­templative bio-drapery. We call it the Grandfather Drape. Although hardly anyone in our section ever had a grand­father, we still know the concept. It's not a difficult concept to grasp" (p.45)

Reading all these "statements" one after the other - without sequence or logic - becomes a kind of hypnotic reading experience, with lots of repetitions - obviously all statements are about the same topic - and new angles of approach. The statements all seem to assume a common knowledge of the context and the objects, which only gradually unfold for the mystified reader, and mostly they don't, resulting in uncanny feeling of total alienation. That is one of the main qualities of Ravn's writing: the coherent language of familiar words that obfuscate the world described instead of illuminating it. 

Dorothy Tse - City Like Water (Fitzcarraldo, 2026) ****

Dorothy Tse Hiu-hung is a writer from Hong-Kong, the city that is the setting of "Owlish" her previous novel, as well as "City Like Water", which gives the dreamy and sinister narrative of a city that disappears, as do its citizens. 

"Nobody will admit that my little sister ever existed. I'm the only one who's glad she got away when she did, exiting our lives like a ball through a window, making barely a sound as she bounced off to the unseeable end of our blindingly sunlit street" (p. 27)

Her style and narrative are elliptic: many things remain unsaid, unnamed, and approached in a very indirect way, maybe as a protective strategy of an author who still lives in China, or maybe as a reflection of what it means to live in a country where every single utterance can be considered a subversion deserving punishment.

"What I actually wanted to say was trodden beneath the soles of my feet, muted like the scurrying shadows. After school, I'd put on my backpack and walk, on and on around the streets, eyes on my silhouette while my mind conjured all the ways the police could collect evidence against me. I'd heard there was a crime called loitering. How far would I have to wander aimlessly, and for how long, to commit it? I mentally rehearsed my response to police questioning. I'd point into the distance, where dust swirled around the foot of a pedestrian bridge, and claim that was where I was headed. Headed to the bridge to uncover the meaning of my life." (p.38)

Her sister disappeared of her own free will. Her mother disappears when sitting together with other housewives in a protest meeting. 

"The missing housewives reappeared on the TV news, their heads carefully extracted from family snapshots and enlarged for our screens. Their long-unused names were resuscitated by the news anchors, who read them aloud in one long list. Those women had become the city's most wanted criminals. I saw my mum's face again; she was posing beside a bushy tangerine tree, wearing new clothes in honour of the new year, sporting a wide grin and that hairdo I cringed to look at. '... the counter-revolutionaries are members of a criminal gang that disguised themselves as housewives' " (p. 51)

Even if the story is told by one person, about her own situation with her sister, her father and mother, the real lead characters are the city and its citizens, as well as the repressive system that wants to drown every act of dissent. Even if the perspective is personal, the story is about the collective. 

"Then we came to realize there was also something childish about the police. They needed only the smallest encouragement to start playing around with their pistols, instantly obsessed with winning their invented game. All we had to do was sit mournfully on the street, sing­ing elegies to our lost mothers, and bullets would come at us from all sides. The smoking rounds released a stink that made our eyes weep as much as our skin. We walked the same streets we had always walked, but now we felt like deep-sea explorers. Even school kids were equipped, their book bags crammed with swimming goggles, water to counteract tear gas, cling film to protect arms from tox­ic spray" (p. 53)

It's only eighty-six pages long, enough to present the drama of a single city delivered to the power of autocracy. 

Dominique De Groen - Corpus Britney (Het Balanseer, 2026) ****½

In vele recensies wordt "Corpus Britney" 'pynchonesk' genoemd, maar dat is wat hoog gegrepen. Inderdaad, het boek is volumineus, de gebeurtenissen zijn bizar, en zowat alles is mogelijk als plotwending, en het gaat ook over de onzichtbare wereld die ons leven mee bepaalt, en die we misschien kunnen vermoeden, maar waar we zelden mee in aanraking komen. Bij Pynchon gaat het dan om een totale samenleving, en de terechte paranoia van het individu om hier mee om te gaan, en dan nog vaak in een situatie die niet te begrijpen is. Een soort mind-fuck die elke rationaliteit overstijgt. 

De benadering van De Groen is meer persoonlijk, als een zoektocht naar zichzelf en haar evenbeeld doorheen tijd en plaats door de raakvlakken van computerspelletjes en verdovende middelen te doorbreken als toegangspoorten tot een andere realiteit, die hopelijk verheldering kan brengen. 

"Op haar scherm verschijnt een ouderwetse webpagina. Twee hoekige 3D-avatars poseren voor een skyline van fonkelende wolkenkrabbers. Het meisje heeft blond haar en draagt een diep uitgesneden wit topje en een felroze broek met lage taille, de jongen draagt een pet en dikke zilveren halskettingen. Beiden zijn flink gebruind en hebben een zonnebril op. 'MTV Virtual Video Music Awards', staat er in grote discoletters bovenaan de afbeelding, en ernaast de tekst: Enter MTV's VIRTUAL Palms Hotel and visit 3 of the extravagant Fantasy Suites featured in the 2007 VMAs - right from your very own living room. It's the oppor­tunity of a lifetime! The basketball themed Hardwood suite, the glammed out Pink Suite and the crown jewel of the Palms, the incredible Sky Villa, will be jammed with celebrity guests all week long. Drop by and party all night long with crazy big stars and a wide world of VMA fanatics.Geen virussen, geen scams, alleen een wanhopige poging van MTV om hun jaarlijkse Video Music Awards een interactieve online­component te geven. So far, so 2007. Het waren de hoogdagen van de virtuele wereld Second Life, waar gebruikers in elke mogelijke gedaante door de digitale domeinen konden dwalen, andere avatars ontmoeten, handeldrijven en houterige seks hebben met vreemden in gothic BDSM-kelders (al heeft ze dat laatste enkel van horen zeggen). Blijkbaar wilde MTV niet achterblijven. Malayneys cursor zweeft over de blauwe knop in het midden van de pagina. Hij zal haar transporteren naar het digitaal gesimu­leerde Palms Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, waar de VMA's dat jaar plaatsvonden. In de ruïnes van dat vergeten experiment zullen zij en tOxic_slut elkaar na al die jaren treffen. (p.99)

Welkom in de vreemde wereld van De Groen, wiens taalgebruik honderd procent hedendaags is, zonder zich al te veel te bekommeren om welke taal dat is, en die zeker ook geen uitleg behoeven. 

'Silas Silverfox, ma'am. Aangenaam'. Hij stampt zijn peuk uit met de hak van zijn laars en rolt een nieuwe sigaret. Zijn knoestige vingers werken nauwkeurig, voorzichtig, bijna teder. Malayney voelt een wilde kriebel in haar kut. De man is half doorschijnend! zegt ze tegen zichzelf. Kan best zijn, werpen haar eileiders tegen, maar check dat compacte, gespierde, gehavende lijf, die zilve­ren strepen in zijn haar, die diepe groeven in zijn gebruinde voorhoofd, die stem gemarineerd in mescal en roltabak ... Uh, sploosh? Hoop maar dat je hier straks een werkende kraan vindt om je broekje uit te wassen. Wat maakt het ons uit dat hij een man zonder substantie is? Hij heeft andere kwaliteiten. Dit is het lichaam van een man die geleefd heeft.  Nu ja, lichaam. Natuurlijk is het hele 'immateriele, half­in-half-uit deze dimensie'-ding Malayneys ultieme turn-on. Ze moet het toegeven, dit is haar achilleshiel; smachten naar wolken psychische energie, naar wezens die zich slechts eens om de vier jaar op het materiële vlak manifesteren, en dan verbaasd zijn dat ze chronisch droogstaat, ha-ha, typisch Malayney ... Ze kijkt weg terwijl Silverf ox aan het vloeipapier likt. Zijn halfdoorschijnende tong dreigt dingen in haar wakker te maken die ze niet de vrije loop wil laten. Hij steekt zijn sigaret aan en begint te vertellen." (p. 355)

Dit dus. Vierhonderdzeventig bladzijden lang, en elk blad, elke zin zijn een plezier te lezen. De Groen is een ontketende schrijfster, iemand die ver buiten de lijntjes kleurt, die meegesleurd wordt door haar eigen schrijf-enthousiasme, door de schier eindeloze mogelijkheden van plotwendingen, karakters, situaties en rationale en fysieke onmogelijkheden, die door fictie natuurlijk wel kunnen omgetoverd worden tot een nieuwe, andere realiteit. 

Natuurlijk is het niet perfect, maar ik denk dat elke bedenking over beter evenwicht, betere beheersing een rem zouden zijn geweest op de leeservaring die we nu krijgen voorgeschoteld. 

Het is bombastisch, exuberant, uitbundig, levendig, overvloedig, weelderig, bandeloos, buitensporig, extravagant, ongeremd, tomeloos en soms wild. Ik vaak hardop gelachen met de branie van haar stijl, het plezier waarmee ze zinnen en situaties moet hebben neergepend. 

Weg met de kneuterige en parochiale Nederlandse literatuur. Geef mij maar De Groen!

Elif Shafak - Honour (Penguin, 2012) ***

This is the third novel I read by British author Elif Shafak, after "There Are Rivers In The Sky" (Penguin, 2025) and "10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World" (Penguin, 2020). 

"Honour" gives again a kaleidoscopic narrative in different times (1961 and 1977/1978) and places (London and a "place near river Euphrates"), and many narrators who tell the events in the story each from their perspective, including letters from jail. Esma Toprak, a London-bred Turkish Kurd, goes to Shrewsbury Prison to collect her brother, who has just served a 14-year term for the murder of their mother, as a means to protect the family honour.

The story starts in a Kurdish village where two baby girls are born, "Pembe Kader and Jamila Yeter - Pink Destiny and Enough Beauty. Who could tell that one of these names would some day be printed in newspapers all around the world"? Both twin sisters have different characters, the one more introvert, the other more adventurous, one stays in the village and become a midwife, the other moves to London in the hope of offering her children a better future. 

As time evolves, relationships build, careers develop, and the generations follow one another. Shafak creates a whole family universe with all its complexities, frustrations, setbacks and friendships. To her credit, each character has a justifiable perspective, and even Iskender, who is in jail, has a voice that is worth hearing, caught up as he was in the old traditional code of honour that sometimes results in violence and death. 

Shafak starts the book with this paragraph: "When I was seven years old, we lived in a green house. One of our neighbours, a talented tailor, would often beat his wife. In the evenings, we listened to the shouts, the cries, the swearing. In the morning, we went on with our lives as usual. The entire neighbourhood pretended not to have heard, not to have seen."

She takes a stand against domestic violence and mindless honour codes. In the novel, she lets her characters speak. Of the three novels I have read by her, this is not the one that I liked most, primarily because she gives too much detail, too many words that drown the progress of the narrative. 

Liadan Ní Chuinn - Every One Still Here (Granta, 2026) ****

Liadan Ní Chuinn is a brilliant story-teller. For each of the six stories in this book, 'they' find a singular voice and angle of approach that gives the narrative poignancy and directness, authenticity and the possibility to relate to the main character. 

And this is despite the fact that all of the stories are characterised by highly unusual subject matter: a Protestant hijacking of a Catholic family’s car, which takes place while the first-person narrator, Jackie, is still in the womb; a museum in which a “disrupter” lays floral tributes beside exhibits of human remains; and a medical-school dissection class where students cut into human bodies with scalpels while grappling with questions of consent: “But did they know that they weren’t going to stay whole? But did they sign that their head could be taken off at the neck?” In another story, terminal illness gradually reduces a beloved husband to bodily fluids, lumps, and a contorted, collapsing skeleton. Yet this physical deterioration does not diminish his wife’s devotion. She continues to care for him with almost ritualistic tenderness, shaving him, trimming his fingernails and ear hairs, bathing him with coconut oil, and tending to his increasingly fragile body; in the last story, another male character, Rowan, angrily defends his preoccupation with British soldiers’ actions in Ulster, arguing back against a friend who sees fault on both sides and wants to consign the Troubles to the past

“I’m sick of this, right, Rowan?” his cousin Shane says. “It happened, right? It happened, two sides, either side, both, it happened, it stopped.
I hate that, says Rowan. It’s not both sides, it’s not either side, it’s this huge fucking army, it’s this huge fucking state, this government that does whatever it wants, that just, that, they can kill us, and kill us.”

But first and foremost, all the characters are human, people with clear context, emotions and carefully defined personalities, people you can relate to. Despite the often heavy situations in which they end up, there is still room for humour and the relative nature of life: 

A psychic asks her client why he’s come. "Aren’t you supposed to know? he answers. “The psychic says: Everyone, no word of a lie, every single person says that. You’ve, none of youse, you’ve no concept of how this works.”

Recommended! 

Steven Mithen - The Language Puzzle (Profile Books, 2024) ***

Maybe my expectations were too high, or maybe I missed some of the essence of this book, but it left me somewhat disappointed. Steven Mithen is a "British archaeologist. He is noted for his work on the evolution of language, music and intelligence, prehistoric hunter-gatherers, and the origins of farming. He is professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading" (Wikipedia). The title is an apt one, in which he brings all the current knowledge together as pieces of a huge puzzle: language among animals and especially apes, the evolution of the human brain, the evolution of culture and the need for communication, the nature of language, the physiology of speech and hearing, language to transcend the concrete world, etc. 

"As such, their lexicons had little impact on how they perceived the world. Modern humans used linguistic metaphors to explain and understand abstract concepts - ideas about other worlds and ancestral beings, notions of justice, identity and ownership. 

Such concepts could be assembled into new categories with no grounding in the world, which then eased the invention of learning, recall and explanation of further abstract concept that now had a category to sit within. Once the category of the supernatural was conceived, this provided a home for new concepts and their associated words, such as ghosts, spirits and spells. The lexicon continued to expand and stories took on new dimensions with complex plots, heroes and villains, magic, events and imaginary worlds. Storytelling became an art form for impressing, persuading, educating and entertaining by the skilful use of words. (p 388)

Many of these aspects are of course widely known, and it is of interest to see them all listed one after the other, yet there is no deeper insight than what was already known. The puzzle, once made, shows a picture that was already familiar, because not specific to language or its evolution. He misses a great deal of information on recent research in neuroscience on language. 

My son Tom did his PhD on the neurological origin of language, conducting brain scans to identify which types of words and even concepts were located in which part of the brain. Interestingly, it was not in the prefrontal cortex as many expected, but in the deeper part, the amygdala or the 'animal' part of the brain. 

Charlotte Van den Broeck - Een Vlam Tasmaanse Tijgers (Arbeiderspers, 2025) ****

Van dit boek heb ik echt genoten. Het is geen fictie, maar het leest als fictie. Charlotte Van den Broeck behaalde een Master Engelse en Duitse Letterkunde aan de Universiteit Gent en een Master Drama aan het Koninklijk Conservatorium, Antwerpen. In 2015 debuteerde ze met de dichtbundel ‘Kameleon’, bekroond met de Herman De Coninck Debuutprijs. In 2017 verscheen ‘Nachtroer’, waarvoor ze de driejaarlijkse Paul Snoekprijs voor de beste Nederlandstalige bundel kreeg. 

Dit is iets heel anders. Dit is het verslag van een persoonlijke reis naar Tasmanië, op zoek naar de laatste Tasmaanse Tijger, die laatst leven werd gezien in een zoo in 1936, en in het wild in 1930, maar sommigen beweren dit schuwe dier toch nog gespot te hebben in de Tasmaanse oerwouden. Van den Broeck gaat op zoek, en spreekt in Tasmanië met wetenschappers en met gewone mensen op plekken waar het dier zogezegd zou gezien zijn. Haar reis is tegelijk een grote mijmering over onze samenleving, die respectloos omgaat met een broze natuur, met een vergankelijkheid die niet kan worden gereconstrueerd, ook niet als onze wetenschap op basis van DNA ooit een nieuw dier te voorschijn kan toveren, zal het wel de biologische kenmerken hebben, maar nooit de 'culturele' kennis om te kunnen overleven in het wild. En wie wil nu een dier tot leven wekken dat gedoemd is om in een kooi te leven? 

Ze stelt de juiste vragen in mijn ogen, legt ook de juiste verbanden tussen wetenschappelijke bevindingen en hun interpretatie. 

"Anderzijds denken we misschien graag dat onze bevindingen wetenschappelijke reve­laties zijn, maar het zijn verhalen, in de zin dat we ze moeten interpreteren. Ze spreken niet voor zichzelf, maar hebben even­goed analyse nodig om betekenis te krijgen. Soms zijn er drie of vier opeenvolgende onderzoekers die op hetzelf de onderwerp voortborduren, waarbij de opvolger steeds de set verhalen van de vorige uitdaagt en daar weer op voortbouwt. Het is een uit­dijend heelal van begrijpen. De verhalen breiden zich uit in de tijd en het zal nooit ophouden. Mensen zullen over honderden jaren nog steeds met deze fossielen werken en hopelijk zullen de verhalen steeds beter worden, strakker geredigeerd, maar altijd onderhevig aan uitdaging - dat is wetenschap. Er is geen zekerheid. Geen waarheid. Wetenschap moet altijd kwetsbaar zijn, dat is heel belangrijk. Wetenschap eist dat je kan bewijzen dat iets fout is. Als je een idee naar voren schuift dat niet getest kan worden, dan is het geen wetenschap." (blz 256)

Zoals je merkt, het is ook een filosofisch-wetenschappelijk werk. Het leest vlot. Het is aangrijpend en menselijk. Het stelt onze hele samenleving, onze hele manier van leven in vraag. Het boek gaat misschien nog meer over de mens dan over de Tasmaanse tijger. 

Heerlijk hoe non-fictie ook literatuur kan zijn! 

 

Jonathan Haidt - The Anxious Generation (Penguin, 2025) ****

This is a hot topic of discussion among my children about the education of our grandchildren. What is allowed or not? How much screen time? Which controls? Are social media even at all allowed? 

Jonathan Haidt makes his key points from the start of the book, and you truly wonder what he will write in the next 300 pages that will interest the reader, yet he manages to be substantiated, broad in his knowledge base, and equally generous to the opinion of other perspectives, yet the data and evidence are clear enough. Children learn a lot of social skills by playing: outdoor, physical activities with changing alliances, and with the obvious insight that nobody is good at everything all the time. You win, you loose. He uses Gray's definition on the value of play: "play requires suppression of the drive to dominate and enables the formation of long-lasting cooperative bonds". Social media do the exact opposite. 

"The way young people use social media is generally not much like free play. In fact, posting and commenting on social media sites is the opposite of Gray's definition. Life on the platforms forces young people to become their own branq. managers, always thinking ahead about the social consequences of each photo, video, comment, and emoji they choose. Each action is not necessarily done for its own sake: rather, every public action is, to some degree, strategic. It is, in Peter Gray's phrase, consciously pursued to achieve ends that are distinct from the activity itself. Even for kids who never post anything, spending time on social media sites can still be harmful because of the chronic social comparison, the unachievable beauty standards, and the enormous amount of time taken away from everything else in life" (p. 57)

And the value of outdoor play is clear:  

"Unsupervised outdoor play teaches children how to handle risks and challenges of many kinds. By building physical, psy­chological, and social competence, it gives kids confidence that they can face new situations, which is an inoculation against anxiety. (...) a healthy human child­hood with a lot of autonomy and unsupervised play in the real. world se'ts- children's brains to operate mostly in ''discover mode," with a well-developed attachment system and an abil­ity to handle the risks of daily life. Conversely, when there is society-wide pressure on parents to adopt modern overpro­tective parenting, it sets children's brains to operate mostly in ''defend mode, with less secure attachment and reduced ability to evaluate or handle risk. (p. 72)

The systematic use and access to social media as of a young age, can have devastating results for future development: 

"The human brain reaches 90% of its adult size by age 5, and it has far more neurons and synapses at that moment than it will have in its adult form. Subsequent brain development, therefore, is not about overall growth but about the selective pruning of neurons and synapses, leaving only the ones that have been frequently used. Brain researchers say, ''Neu­rons that fire together, wire together," meaning that activities that repeatedly activate a constellation of neurons cause those neurons to connect more closely. If a child goes through puberty doing a lot of archery, or painting, or video games, or social media, those activities will cause lasting structural changes in the brain, especially if they are rewarding. (p. 102)

And this also results in effects on gender activities and motivations: 

"The two motives are woven together in changing patterns across the life course, and that weaving is particularly important for adolescents who are developing their identities. Part of defining the self comes from successfully integrating into groups; part of being attractive to groups is demonstrating one's value as an individual with unique skills. Researchers have long found that boys and men are more focused on agency strivings while girls and women are more focused on communion strivings. The fact that these gender differences have decreased over time tells us that they result in part from cultural fac­tors and forces. The fact that they emerge early in children's play and can be found in the gendered play patterns of other primates tells us that there is probably a biological contribution as well. (p. 163)

In user statistics across the globe, the impact of social media on the mental well-being, suicides and school results are confirmed again and again. 

"When everything moved onto smartphones in the early 2010s, both girls and boys experienced a gigantic increase in the number of their social ties and in the time required to service these ties (such as reading and commenting on the posts of acquaintances or maintaining dozens of Snapchat ''streaks'' with people who are not your closest friends). This explosive growth necessarily caused a decline in the number and depth of close friendships" (p. 180)

Young people become isolated instead of feeling part of a larger group, one that gives them confidence, in which they can play an active role, in which they can listen and be listened to. 

"Durkheim argued that Homo sapiens could just as well be called Homo duplex, or two-level man, for we exist on two very different levels. We spend most of our lives as individuals pursuing our own interests. He called this the realm of the ''profane,'' which means the ordinary day-to-day world where we are very concerned about our own wealth, health, and reputation. But Durkheim showed that nearly all societies have created rituals and communal prac­tices for pulling people 'up,' temporarily, into the realm of the sacred, where the self recedes and collective interests predomin­ate. Think of Christians singing hymns together every Sunday in church; think of Muslims circling the Kaaba in Mecca; think of civil rights marchers singing as they walked. Evidence that these two levels are available to everyone, even outside a religious con­text, can be found in the ways that fans of sports teams use similar techniques to bind themselves toge.ther before a game with pep rallies, the singing of fight songs, and shared consciousness alteration (usually from alcohol), along with a variety of quasi­religious rituals, superstitions, and body markings. It is a thrill to be one of thousands of fans in a stadium, all singing and stomp­ing in unison after each goal or touchdown. Durkheim called this state of energized communion ''collective effervescence.'; 

This is one of the founding insights of sociology: Strong com­munities don't just magically appear whenever people congregate and communicate. The strongest and most satisfying communities come into being when something lifts people out of the lower level so that they have powerful collective experiences. They all enter the realm of the sacred together, at the same time. When they return to the profane level, where they need to be most of the time to address the necessities of life, they have greater trust and affection for each other as a result of their time together in the sacred realm. They are also happier and have lower rates of suicide. (p. 218)

He takes it a step higher when discussing the value of spiritual experience in the largest sense, better described by 'awe' for the world around us, including man-made elements:  

"Awe is triggered by two simultaneous perceptions: first, that what you are looking at is vast in some way, and, second, that you can't fit it into your existing mental structures. That combination seems to trigger a feeling in people of being small in a profoundly pleasurable - although sometimes also fearful - way. Awe opens us to changing our beliefs, allegiances, and behaviors. Dacher (...) and his students collected thousands of accounts of awe experiences from people around the world and sorted them  into the 'eight most common categories, which he calls the ''eight wonders of life": they are moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spiritual and religious awe, life and death, and epiphanies (moments in which a new and grand under­standing dawns). 'p. 228)

"Soon before his death in 1662, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote a paragraph often paraphrased as ''there is a God-shaped hole in every human heart." I believe he was right. In "The Righteous Mind" I drew on the writings of Charles Darwin and the biologist David Sloan Wilson to explain how natural selection might have carved that hole: humanity went through a long period of what is known as multilevel selection in which groups competed with groups, while at the same time individuals competed with indi­viduals within each group. The most cohesive groups won, and humans evolved - by both biological and cultural evolution - an adaptation that made their groups even more cohesive: religiosity (including both the fear and the love of gods). (p. 213)

An excellent book that I can recommend to any parent and grandparent, even if his writing is very scientific and aimed at policy-makers and educators more than to citizens, but I think we will all benefit if the monster of social media can be reigned in to create value instead of devastation.