UNKNOWN DESTINATION

An elegant translation of a stylistically eerie, fearless, well-received Dutch first novel recounts the personal, anguished search of a husband and father for his elusive, rebellious wife.

A year after the puzzling but not inexplicable disappearance of beautiful 37-year-old Raya Mira Solomon on the night of their dead daughter’s would-be sixth birthday, Raya’s bereft husband finally delves into their seven years of marriage for clues. Gideon is a photographer in Rotterdam working on a collection of photographic interpretations of poems by Rilke, Akhmatova, and others; as he slips into psychotic grief over Raya’s disappearance, his first-person tale becomes an erratic collage of snapshots reflecting the skewed sense of time and chronology in actual memory. Through intimate details of the couple’s brief courtship (three months) and evolving parenthood with Lizzy, who dies mysteriously at age five, Gideon recognizes that he knows very little about his beloved, deceitful wife save that she rejected her rural upbringing, renamed herself, and wrote cryptic messages left around the house for Gideon to read. “Why don’t mothers feel an aversion to their offspring more often?” is one such remembered missive that keeps the reader hooked until Gideon, deluded by his infatuation, faces the truth. Raya Mira, obsessed by her inability to live truthfully and also be a writer, throws herself into the role of motherhood only to conclude that exorcising one’s mortality by having children is the “tragedy of human failing.” Through Gideon’s aching, foggy account, Rasker creates an intriguing (and chilling) portrait without veering into abstruseness, while the supporting cast—Gideon’s masculine nemesis, Jelle, and his albino lover, Brechje—add strange, oblique richness.

A cerebral but riveting narrative about love and parenthood wondrously denuded of the usual sap and sentimentality.