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Tag: herman koch

  • High Impact from the Low Countries

    We begin PEN Atlas in 2013 with Michele Hutchison, who reports on the ‘High Impact’ tour that will bring Dutch authors to the UK later this month

    ‘If there is any relationship between literature and nationality at all, it is a very strained one indeed,’ critic and director of the famed Athenaeum bookshop, Maarten Asscher once wrote in an essay on the misconception that the Dutch are ‘due’ the Nobel Prize. (1) The essay itself is interesting; he argues that the Dutch obsession with consensus means they only ever submit a single candidate, which gives the impression of ‘stagnancy’. But that’s beside the point, the concept of a national literature is a trap I’ve found myself falling into in recent years in my attempts to get to know the local canon.

    Naturally I have identified tendencies in Dutch literature – the Calvinistic background, quiet introspection, naturalistic novels with few characters and little plot. The great writer W.F. Hermans criticised this tendency; ‘boring’ is how he labelled most Dutch novels.(2) An initiative by the Netherlands Embassy in London, in partnership with Flanders House, aims to send a wrecking ball at this cliché.

    Six top Dutch-language writers will tour the UK from 14th
    -19th
    January 2013 in a project named ‘High Impact’, a rather incongruous name on first glance when thinking about that quiet introspection. The Dutch are usually shy of making an impact with their art or literature – those sticking their heads above the parapet tend to be knocked down – but perhaps things are changing.

    I contacted the Embassy to enquire about the thinking behind High Impact and heard back from Jan van Weijen, head of the pleasingly-named Department of Dutchness. This is what he said:“Flanders and The Netherlands have an extensive common cultural heritage and share a language, Dutch. Its literature is vibrant and encapsulates a sea breeze. Outward-looking and incorporating foreign influences, it clearly matches an UK audience.” I also talked to the tour’s curator, international literature specialist Rosie Goldsmith and she said, “the Dutch and Flemish are honestly up there with the best. It is always a pleasure to interview them, not only because they speak excellent English but because I believe our countries and cultures share a great affinity.”   

    So: vibrant, outward-looking, multicultural, with an affinity to the UK? Let’s take a look at the writers involved and what kind of impact they might have. Flemish writer Peter Terrin, who recently won the top Dutch literary prize, the AKO, with his latest novel Post Mortem, works with a filleting knife more than a hammer; his novels are dark, cool, composed affairs. The prize-winning novel, which will be published in 2014 by MacLehose Press, is a study of the impotence of writing in the face of personal tragedy; it is a post-modern puzzle, demonstrating his technical mastery. Wielding a sabre is Ramsey Nasr, just coming to the end of his term as Dutch Poet Laureate. Nasr is half-Palestinian, half-Dutch and knows how to thrill with special effects. His poems are audacious, bombastic, colourful affairs. The collection Heavenly Bodies, published by Banipal provides a good taster of his work.

    Herman Koch is practically a household name now, after his international hit The Dinner. A comedian and actor as well as a writer, he makes his impact with humour. Covering the non-fiction field, there is Belgian writer Lieve Joris who has written extensively on Africa and has now turned her hand to China. Her forthcoming book on the commercial relationship between China and Africa sounds immensely promising and will certainly add to the debate. Geert Mak  will join the last two days of the tour. His magnum opus, In Europe, Travels Through the Twentieth Century brought him international recognition. ‘Mak’s artful interleaving of personal stories with epic events is a constant reminder of the human scale of history’ wrote The New Yorker.

    Chika Unigwe hails from Nigeria but has made her home in Antwerp. I have just finished reading On Black Sister’s Street, published by Jonathan Cape, a Dickensian novel telling the story of four African prostitutes trying to make new lives for themselves in Antwerp. The novel has a tragic ending and the characters remind me of some of Lieve Joris´s studies. Last but not least, Judith Vanistendael will showcase her artistic talents. Both of her graphic novels have been published in English by selfmadehero. The first, Dance to the Light of the Moon is an autobiographical telling of her relationship with a Togolese asylum seeker; it is as incisive and evocative as her second, When David Lost His Voice, a cancer story.  Her novels have great emotional impact.

    The tour’s creators are right, you’d be wrong to expect quiet introspection from this selection of the best that the Low Countries have to offer at the moment. And the Dutch, with their expertise in export are sensible to join together with the Flemish to focus on exporting their common cultural riches.

    *

    The High Impact tour will take place from 14th
    -19th
    January 2013 and stops in Oxford, Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield, Norwich and London. Please see     www.highimpact-tour.nl and www.highimpacttour.com. Follow my live blogs from the tour:

    Twitter: @HighImpactTour

    Facebook community: High Impact

    About the Author

    Michele Hutchison (Solihull, 1972) worked in publishing in the UK before moving to the Netherlands in 2004. She now works as an editor at a Dutch literary publishing house and as a freelance translator. Writers she has translated include Joris Luyendijk, Rob Riemen, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer and Simone van der Vlugt.

    Additional Links

    Interview with Sam Garrett on translating The Dinner: http://www.letterenfonds.nl/en/entry/245/translators-in-the-spotlight

    Michele Hutchison on Herman Koch, author of The Dinner, for PEN Atlas: https://pentrandata.bulletserve.net/entertainment-for-the-middle-classes-the-success-of-herman-koch/

    Notes

    1. “‘The 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature should go to the Netherlands’ – a misconception of national proportions” in De Gids, issue 5/6.
    2. “Unsympathetic Characters”, in Dutch Literary Journal, vol 4, 2013

     

  • PEN Atlas – Editor's Round Up

    In the first of a monthly series, PEN Atlas editor Tasja Dorkofikis rounds up some of the highlights so far, and suggests some great further reading for our literary travellers

    Dear Readers,

    We launched the PEN Atlas over six months ago and have now 30 pieces published online, all newly commissioned and written for us. I would like to highlight the most recent blogs and books we mentioned.

    At the beginning of September we published dispatches from two exceptional women.

    Samar Yazbek wrote from Syria about the dangers of reporting and writing from a conflict zone. Yazbek, a writer and a journalist, was active in the first four months of the Syrian uprising in 2011. She witnessed and experienced cruelty and torture from the Assad regime. During that time she kept a diary of her own reflections as well as of oral testimonies from other opposition fighters. In her book, Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution, she shows the reality of what’s happening there and brings us stories of many people who risk their lives in the struggle for freedom. The insight that Yazbek offers into the complex and bloody conflict is both incredibly valuable and inspiring.

    Her novel, Cinnamon, will be published by Arabia Books later this year. Fearing for her daughter’s life she was forced to leave Syria and she is now in hiding. 

    Lydia Cacho wrote from Mexico about censorship and about the power the government and media over journalists and reporters. Her new book Slavery Inc; the Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking, just published in the UK, follows the trail of the traffickers and their victims from Mexico to Turkey, Thailand to Iraq, Georgia to the UK, and exposes the trade’s hidden links with the tourist industry, internet pornography, drugs and arms smuggling, money laundering,  and terrorism.  Cacho’s powerful first-person interviews with mafiosi, pimps, prostitutes, and those who managed to escape from captivity make us aware of the terrible human cost of this exchange. Shocking and sobering, Slavery Inc, is an exceptional book, both for the scope of its investigation, and for the bravery with which Cacho pursues the truth.

    English PEN has also been busy this month promoting a biography of Ryszard Kapuscinski by Artur Domoslawski, one of the winners of its Writers in Translation award (PEN Promotes!). You can read on our site a conversation with the author and some further recommendations of Polish reportage recently published in the UK. It is worth remembering that Polish reportage has an established and celebrated tradition from Ryszard Kapuscinski and Hanna Krall to Mariusz Szczygiel (winner of European Book Award for Gottland) and recently to Andrzej Dybczak, who has just won the prestigious Koscielski Prize for his reportage on the nomadic tribes of Evenks in Siberia. And one more piece of Polish literary news – many Polish writers are touring UK this autumn: the details are here.

    Our other dispatches took us to the Netherlands where Michele Hutchison examined the success of The Dinner by Herman Koch, a novel full of suspense and middle-class anxiety, and to the Edinburgh Festival where Daniel Hahn considered the issue of translation and Krys Lee looked at how migration and displacement encourages creativity.

    As we know, there is far too little literature in translation published in English. Our aim at the PEN Atlas is to introduce new international writing to readers in the UK and to encourage publishers to bring that writing to the British market. We hope to give new insights into the rich literary landscape beyond the English language and to inspire people to seek out new writers in translation. I hope that you will enjoy reading our site and our writers, and will find them enriching and inspiring.  

    Tasja Dorkofikis

    Editor, PEN Atlas

    Tasja Dorkofikis is the editor of the PEN Atlas as well as a freelance editor and publicist. She used to work as Publicity Director at Random House and most recently at Portobello Books as Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor. Tasja shares her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.

     

  • PEN Atlas – Editor’s Round Up

    In the first of a monthly series, PEN Atlas editor Tasja Dorkofikis rounds up some of the highlights so far, and suggests some great further reading for our literary travellers

    Dear Readers,

    We launched the PEN Atlas over six months ago and have now 30 pieces published online, all newly commissioned and written for us. I would like to highlight the most recent blogs and books we mentioned.

    At the beginning of September we published dispatches from two exceptional women.

    Samar Yazbek wrote from Syria about the dangers of reporting and writing from a conflict zone. Yazbek, a writer and a journalist, was active in the first four months of the Syrian uprising in 2011. She witnessed and experienced cruelty and torture from the Assad regime. During that time she kept a diary of her own reflections as well as of oral testimonies from other opposition fighters. In her book, Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution, she shows the reality of what’s happening there and brings us stories of many people who risk their lives in the struggle for freedom. The insight that Yazbek offers into the complex and bloody conflict is both incredibly valuable and inspiring.

    Her novel, Cinnamon, will be published by Arabia Books later this year. Fearing for her daughter’s life she was forced to leave Syria and she is now in hiding. 

    Lydia Cacho wrote from Mexico about censorship and about the power the government and media over journalists and reporters. Her new book Slavery Inc; the Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking, just published in the UK, follows the trail of the traffickers and their victims from Mexico to Turkey, Thailand to Iraq, Georgia to the UK, and exposes the trade’s hidden links with the tourist industry, internet pornography, drugs and arms smuggling, money laundering,  and terrorism.  Cacho’s powerful first-person interviews with mafiosi, pimps, prostitutes, and those who managed to escape from captivity make us aware of the terrible human cost of this exchange. Shocking and sobering, Slavery Inc, is an exceptional book, both for the scope of its investigation, and for the bravery with which Cacho pursues the truth.

    English PEN has also been busy this month promoting a biography of Ryszard Kapuscinski by Artur Domoslawski, one of the winners of its Writers in Translation award (PEN Promotes!). You can read on our site a conversation with the author and some further recommendations of Polish reportage recently published in the UK. It is worth remembering that Polish reportage has an established and celebrated tradition from Ryszard Kapuscinski and Hanna Krall to Mariusz Szczygiel (winner of European Book Award for Gottland) and recently to Andrzej Dybczak, who has just won the prestigious Koscielski Prize for his reportage on the nomadic tribes of Evenks in Siberia. And one more piece of Polish literary news – many Polish writers are touring UK this autumn: the details are here.

    Our other dispatches took us to the Netherlands where Michele Hutchison examined the success of The Dinner by Herman Koch, a novel full of suspense and middle-class anxiety, and to the Edinburgh Festival where Daniel Hahn considered the issue of translation and Krys Lee looked at how migration and displacement encourages creativity.

    As we know, there is far too little literature in translation published in English. Our aim at the PEN Atlas is to introduce new international writing to readers in the UK and to encourage publishers to bring that writing to the British market. We hope to give new insights into the rich literary landscape beyond the English language and to inspire people to seek out new writers in translation. I hope that you will enjoy reading our site and our writers, and will find them enriching and inspiring.  

    Tasja Dorkofikis

    Editor, PEN Atlas

    Tasja Dorkofikis is the editor of the PEN Atlas as well as a freelance editor and publicist. She used to work as Publicity Director at Random House and most recently at Portobello Books as Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor. Tasja shares her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.

     

  • Entertainment for the Middle Classes? – The success of Herman Koch

    Over a million copies sold, multiple translations, a stage adaptation  – does Herman Koch’s The Dinner show us a new way for Dutch literature? Michele Hutchison investigates for PEN Atlas

    Not long after I’d moved to Amsterdam and become interested in Dutch literature, I was confronted with an exotic word: straatrumoer. Literally, ‘the sound from the street’. I learned that, in the 1980s, an academic called Ton Anbeek, who’d spent time in the States, had caused ripples in the literary world by suggesting that contemporary Dutch literature needed a lot more of it. Anbeek had compared recent American fiction with Dutch and came to the conclusion that Dutch fiction contained too little political engagement and too much navel-gazing. Novelists should work harder to reflect and comment on social reality, presumably as Don Delillo and Thomas Pynchon did.

    Anbeek was lucky, just then a new generation of young writers like Joost Zwagerman, Arnon Grunberg, Ronald Giphart, and Hafid Bouzza came along, and the problem ostensibly was addressed. Contemporary social reality and politics – matters outside the protagonist’s psyche – gained a larger role in fiction. Psychological fiction moved towards faction. Nevertheless, public complaints against Dutch literature rumbled on. In 2006, then Prime Minister, JP Balkenende, wrote to eminent novelist Harry Mulisch lamenting the lack of social engagement in the arts. Where was the Grand Design? Vision? Ideals? Anbeek’s criticism had resurfaced and had even been added to the country’s political agenda!

    Last month, the quality broadsheet NRC Handelsblad published a polemical piece by novelist Marcel Möring. The headline ran, ‘the novel has been degraded to entertainment for the middle-classes’. Möring argued that too much attention had been paid to straatrumoer, ‘the novel has become the sewage works of journalism’. Too much topicality, too much trivial autobiography, too little experiment. No Beckett or Joyce would make it through the current climate; a criticism that would hold true in more countries than just the Netherlands.

    But let’s return to that headline: ‘entertainment for the middle-classes’. Might one of the main targets just be the most successful literary novel of recent years: The Dinner by Herman Koch (2009). It has sold over a million copies here, has been adapted for theatre, and rights have been sold to twenty-five countries. The Dinner slowly reveals dramatic events which precede two middle-class couples having dinner in an expensive restaurant in Amsterdam. Their teenaged sons have committed a crime together and the couples need to talk about what to do next. The novel is a social satire, written in an appealingly light and amusing tone.

    Rival publishers speculated that its extraordinary success was due to the timing of the book, the striking jacket featuring a lobster against a bright blue background, and the fact that the author is also a successful television comedian. The jacket design has mostly been used for translations, yet the content and style seem to have universal appeal – the book has sold fantastically well in Germany, France and Italy, for example. Just published in the UK by Atlantic Booksand translated by Sam Garrett, reviews have been very positive, comparing it to recent successes by Lionel Schriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin) and Christos Tsolkias (The Slap), fashionable novels which are also studies of the angst-ridden bourgeoisie.

    Herman Koch kindly agreed to share his thoughts last week.

    What do you think Dutch literature should set out to do? Should it contain a moral message or just entertain?

    I think literature in general (not only Dutch) should try to be as immoral as possible, but never forget to be entertaining in doing so.

    Are you more influenced by Dutch literature or foreign?

    When I was in my teens I was more influenced by the 19th century Russians than by Dutch writers. Today interesting literature is coming to us from all over the world. I never feel like I should write some Dutch version of the Big American Novel: sometimes I don’t have the patience anymore to start reading a book of more than 500 pages (not the same patience I had when I was eighteen), let alone write it.

    Were you thinking about reflecting contemporary political reality in Holland when you wrote the book?

    Not really, only in so far as that I was thinking of the Dutch political correctness as far as our famous tolerance is concerned. This tolerance now seems to have come to an end, or at least it is showing it’s true face: the Dutch feeling of superiority over foreigners. 

    *

    Thinking then about ‘straatrumoer’, it struck me that, at least to a Brit, street suggests the problematics of the poorer segments of society: drugs, violence, prostitution, immigration. But as Koch’s novel demonstrates, the middle classes are part of social reality and its problems too. His novel plays into the Zeitgeist, speaks to the majority of book readers and some of its success must surely be put down to this too. 

    About the Author

    Michele Hutchison (Solihull, 1972) worked in publishing in the UK before moving to the Netherlands in 2004. She now works as an editor at a Dutch literary publishing house and as a freelance translator. Writers she has translated include Joris Luyendijk, Rob Riemen, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer and Simone van der Vlugt.

    Biography of Herman Koch

    Herman Koch, born in 1953, is a Dutch actor and writer. He studied at the Montessori Lyceum before finishing his schooling in Russia. Koch is a renowned television actor on the series Jiskefet and a columnist for the newspaper Volkskrant. The Dinner is his sixth novel and has already won the prestigious Publieksprijs Prize in 2009. Herman Koch currently lives in Spain.

    http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=1848873824

    Additional Information:

    The Dutch Literary Foundation’s information on The Dinner

    Review in The Telegraph