November 9, 2009
A laborious translation doesn’t help to recommend this otherwise gripping story of dueling Dutch sisters who become separated by a monstrous meteorological anomaly. Lidy takes her sister Armanda’s place on a group trip that ends with a final stand against the legendary New Year’s storm of 1953 that swallowed a large chunk of Holland, killing nearly 2,000. Lidy’s efforts to stay alive span the better part of this saga, and that’s a good thing: de Moor is at her strongest describing the raging elements and Lidy’s traveling partners’ final hours in a farmhouse attic; the arresting details suck the reader into the maelstrom as inexorably as any of the protagonists. While it’s difficult to tell whether the prose’s lack of fluidness is simply de Moor’s style or an aspect of the translation (“Cathrien Padmos began to breathe heavily for the third time in her married life, or to put it more precisely, the cervix was in its last stages of dilation”), her methodical writing is well suited to the story’s technical aspects, of which there are many. Despite some rocky moments—events are set in motion by “a concatenation of different circumstances”—de Moor (The Kreutzer Sonata
) pulls off an involving saga of death foretold.
Starred review from March 15, 2010
This fifth translated novel from the Dutch classical singer-turned-novelist (The Kreutzer Sonata, 2005, etc.) offers a moving dramatization of a historical catastrophe which bears disturbing resemblances to recent global occurrences.
In the winter of 1953, hurricane-driven flood waters rushing in from the North Sea destroyed dikes and obliterated an entire province in the southwestern Netherlands—a territory which"lay embedded between two arms of the sea that did what arms usually do: they move." De Moor observes this disaster from the juxtaposed viewpoints of two sisters—young wife and mother Lidy and her virginal younger sibling Armanda. When Armanda offers to take Lidy's two-year-old daughter Nadja to a party, in exchange for Lidy's appearance at a similar event held for Armanda's godchild—for the sisters resemble each other so closely, few people can tell them apart—they also exchange destinies. Lidy travels to the imminently endangered seaside town of Zierkezee, while Armanda becomes companion for the day to Nadja and her father (and Lidy's husband) Sjoerd. De Moor's laconic, precisely descriptive prose (memorably captured in Janeway's pristine translation) pinpoints numerous indications of what is to come (e.g., the curious phenomenon of hares running alongside cars on a well-traveled highway) and what later occurs (e.g., the sighting of"a farmhouse that…no longer stood in the middle of fields or meadows but in an ocean current"). As Lidy's ordeal, presented in piecemeal fragments of hard-won momentary stays against extinction, approaches its end, Armanda, Sjoerd and Nadja—both during the storm and for years afterward—grasp at whatever forms of enduring and persevering rise up before them. And de Moor brings this harrowing story to a stunning climax, as Armanda, an old woman kept alive by little more than her memories, in effect dreams a long conversation with the beloved sister whose life she has inadvertently appropriated and whose sufferings she has grown and learned to share.
It's hard to resist using the word"symphonic" to describe this exquisitely composed, piercingly moving story. De Moor continues to scale increasingly impressive heights.
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Starred review from December 15, 2009
Readers in America may not know about the tremendous winter hurricane that hit the Netherlands in 1953, overwhelming dikes not maintained since before World War II. In the tsunami-like surge, 2000 drowned. This novel by master storyteller de Moor ("The Kreutzer Sonata") starts with an intriguing premise: two sisters, Lidy and Armanda, who look so much alike that people think of them as interchangeable, swap duties for a weekend. Headstrong Armanda proposes sending Lidy in her place to a family event on the rural Dutch coast, while Armanda stays in Amsterdam and goes to a party. Lidy finds herself running headlong into the unpredicted storm. De Moor carefully interplays the two narratives; Lidy's horrifying ordeal in the storm is clocked almost minute by minute, while the story of Armanda's and Lidy's husbands' lives, wracked by survivor's guilt, unfold over the years. Depictions of Lidy's experiences in the monster storm are terrifying in their realism; knowing she is doomed doesn't lessen the tension. VERDICT Aspects of this novel recall Sebastian Junger's "The Perfect Storm", but this powerful fictional account of facing death and living with loss cuts closer to the bone. Highly recommended for fans of quality fiction.Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VA
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