Search results for ""Author Paul Vincent""

Thirty-year-old Theresa Pellikaan is typical of the wealthy middle classes - with her respectable background, successful husband and house in an apparently sleepy, yet powerful, rich village. She works in a gallery, also typical of her type. When her former schoolmate Ruth Ackermann, brought up in the same village, makes waves with an international bestseller, but none of the villagers ever mention her achievement, not even the literary circle of Theresa's father, famous civil rights scholar Randolf Pellikaan, Theresa begins to wonder why. It can't only be because it's not 'literature'. It emerges that there is a dark secret in the village. Every member of the book club has a reason to keep quiet and Ruth Ackerman's novel threatens to bring the past into the present, with devastating results. Unable to cope with the silence, Theresa investigates, no matter the consequences.

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In this volume Paul Vincent presents a compelling collection of prose fiction, memoirs and anecdotes centring on Amsterdam from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. His selection offers a rare insight into the history and culture of the city. The subjects range from Rembrandt to the persecution of the Jews in World War 2, from barricades in a working-class district during the Depression to a writer's unhealthy obsession with a massage parlour. These eighteen newly-translated tales give the reader, and the traveller, a tantalizing glimpse of the Amsterdam that lies beyond the tourist guidebooks.

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`I was born in Belgium, I’m Belgian. / But Belgium was never born in me.’ So writes Leonard Nolens in `Place and Date’, which captures a mood of political and social disillusionment amid a generation of Dutch-speaking Belgians. And throughout this selection we encounter a poet engaged with the question of national identity. Frequently the poet moves into that risky terrain, the firstperson plural, in which he speaks as and for a generation of Flemings, embodying an attitude towards artistic and political commitment that he considers its defining mark. `We curled up dejectedly in the spare wheel of May sixtyeight’, he writes in the selection’s central sequence `Breach’. Nolens’ poetry is haunted by giants of twentieth-century European lyricism, by Rilke, Valéry, Neruda, Mandelstam and Celan, with whom he has arguably more affinity than with much poetry from the Dutch-language canon.

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The Flemish writer Dani?l Robberechts (1937-1992) refused to identify his books as novels, stories, or essays, according them all equal status as, simply, writing. This liberation from genre gives his work, for all its apparent simplicity, an elusive, hypnotic quality, and no more so than in his debut, "Arriving in Avignon," which records a young man's first encounter with that labyrinthine city, and his likewise meandering relationship with a girl from his home town-and indeed virtually every woman he meets. Hesistant and cautious, unable quite to enter nor turn away, the young man seems to circle Avignon endlessly, in the process attempting to delay his inevitable descent into maturity and monogamy. What seems at first like a cross between a memoir and a guidebook comes in time to be the story of a young man's dogged yet futile quest to know his own mind-unless it's the ancient city of Avignon itself that is our real protagonist: a mystery that can be approached, but never wholly solved.

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This, the author writes, is "the novel of the individual in a world of barbarians." It is the story of Ondine and Oscarke, a young married couple adrift in a Belgian landscape that is darkening under the spread of industry and World War I. Ondine, who "came to serve god and live," finds that she must "serve the gentlemen" instead. Oscarke, an aspiring sculptor, finds himself unsuccessfully scouring Brussels for work and, when he is finally hired, too tired to make his own art. They grow old and their four children grow up as "technology and mechanization, unemployment, fascism, and war" take over around them. War destroys their attempts to establish a better life, which they seek continually and against all odds. And the chapters about these characters, some of whom first appeared in Chapel Road, alternate with chapters about Boon himself, who describes the impossibility of modern life and the destruction of war. As this wide-ranging novel progresses, the author's struggles--both with writing and with his own life--come more and more to resemble those of his characters.

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Following in the footsteps of Celine and Joyce, and anticipating the gritty worldview of Burroughs and Bukowski . . .

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