"Koch is consistently attuned to our hidden foibles and fakery, which makes for deliberately discomfiting reading. Sleeker writing would enhance its impact."
A man contemplates getting back at the novelist who exploited his life in fiction.
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"This haunting book doesn't try to sort out Ludwig's internal life, it just places the reader in the middle."
The poet Philip Larkin's famous observation that your mom and dad really mess you up is aptly illustrated in this offbeat, atmospheric novel by Dutch author Wieringa (Joe Speedboat, 2010, etc.). Though the narrative takes awhile to reveal itself, the book is ultimately about the psychological damage inflicted on Ludwig Unger, a gifted young pianist, by his absent father and manipulative yet seductive mother, Marthe.
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"An insightful history of the lives, times and works of some authors now virtually forgotten in the West, and a valuable addition to the study of Soviet letters."
A former Moscow correspondent for a Dutch newspaper conducts a literary travelogue revealing a remarkable geography and a strange, fraught alliance when the pen was not as mighty as the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union.
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"An adventure in history packed with details—some intimate, some surprising, some shocking, and all convergent into an essential, coherent story of modern Europe."
An international bestseller, this epic work follows the flow of time through European locales almost as a geologist follows a riverbed.
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"Hard to believe this listless, modestly amusing tale won the Netherlands' prestigious AKO Prize."
Dutch author Grunberg (Silent Extras, 2001, etc.) traces the rise and fall and rise of a literary writer whose sine waves of desperation are ultimately evened out by his unlikely authorship of a cookbook.
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"A well-constructed if somewhat dispiriting, perhaps even nihilistic, tale."
The American debut of Dutch novelist Van Loon is a kind of domestic thriller about a young father who learns that his dead wife's son is not his child.
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"Krabbé revs up the tension expertly via several ingenious shifts in viewpoint and carefully placed surprises, in a fabulously plotted melodrama that will doubtless inspire another terrific movie."
Dutch novelist Krabbé—a contemporary noir master who's a cross between Patricia Highsmith and Jim Thompson—is best known for his eerie novel The Golden Egg, which was filmed (brilliantly) as The Vanishing.
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