My Father's War

A Father, A Son, A Family's Secret

Autor*innen

• Adriaan van Dis
• Claire Nicolas White

Parameter

• 320 Seiten
• 12 Lesestunden

• Belletristik
• Familie
• Historische Romane
• Niederländische Literatur
• Schule

Mehr zum Buch

Adriaan van Dis employs masterful skill in telling this rich story of a Dutch man who, in midlife, is coming to terms with the losses in his life and their effect on his family. His half sister's death revives memories of his father, a Dutch soldier who spent three years in a Japanese concentration camp only to die in the Netherlands when the narrator was 11. The drama unfolds as he uncovers the complicated history of his family and realizes what he remembers of his father doesn't match the recollections of others. That this book can address themes as diverse as sibling relationships, child abuse, war, and repressed memories with such subtlety and even a touch of humor is testament to both the quality of van Dis's writing and the expertise of his translator, Claire Nicolas White. From Publishers Weekly The English-language debut by Dutch novelist van Dis is a grim look at a life rattled by the lasting effects of an old war. A child of refugees from Dutch Indonesia, which was occupied during WWII by Japan, the unnamed narrator grew up perceiving the marginalization of his family from mainstream Dutch society. But deeper psychological scars emerge when he is an adult as, all of a sudden, his family begins to disintegrate. First, his sister Ada dies, leaving behind a husband saddled with mental problems and a son drifting through adolescence. Then another sister, Jana, who fled to Canada years earlier, takes ill. All this trauma prompts a third sister, Saskia, to reveal memories, thought long buried, of the Japanese internment camps the family lived through before the narrator's birth. These in turn force the narrator to deal with memories of his father, a hard, cruel man who joined the family after his mother's first husband disappeared. Van Dis adeptly shows how wartime traumas linger in a society's collective memory, even creeping into everyday vocabulary. But the bleaknesss is unrelieved by humor or even color. The narrator's girlfriend remains a shadowy presence, mentioned but never seen, and moments of fulfillment are few and painfully brief. The novel's tone is so unremittingly somber that, by the end, all emotional resonance has dissipated. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Einband: Paperback