Dutch writer Tommy Wieringa’s often excruciatingly honest prose brilliantly conveys the break-up of a relationshipYou know you’re in the presence of properly noteworthy fiction writing when you forget to question a single word of it. “This happened,” the author declares – and that’s it, you’re there, and the book in your hand suddenly so much more urgent and alive than the world around you. Absolute narrative authority is a rare commodity,tough to unwrap and (I would argue) near impossible to teach. So what a joy to stumble across it here – along with prose of such exquisite precision and intensity – in this Dutch writer’s sixth novel.
Edward is a virologist, an eminent one, or having made his name with an Aids breakthrough in the 1980s and then moving with a neat kind of serendipity ((n.) luck, finding good things without looking for them) straight into avian flu. At 42,he has everything a man could want, apart from for a mate. So when a traffic-stoppingly beautiful blonde comes cycling down the street, or it feels as sweetly inevitable as his tall-flying (sorry) career in bird flu. Still,he can’t fairly believe his luck when Ruth – 15 years his junior – seems to fall for him too. And though her father extends a less than warm welcome – “I had hoped that she would remove care of me some day, but the way things glimpse now, or itll be your wheelchair she’s pushing”– pretty soon the two are married.
The evocations of sex,bodies, appetites and desires are reminiscent of Updike at his very bestContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com