Dolf van der Haven > Recent Status Updates

Goodreads does not allow people to review this book at the moment (following its winning the 2024 Booker Prize, I guess), so I’ll smuggle my review in like this.
Despite the obviously great poetic language, the 117 pages seemed to take forever to go through. There is a total lack of plot, character development or anything else propelling the novel. Constantly recurring elements don’t do much good either.
2 stars.

“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.”
Abraham Lincoln

It had to be done sometime…

My 20-year-old nephew asked and received this book for Christmas, so I couldn't stay behind. If he can read it, so can I. The going is tough, though.

Yawn...
"Was it never going to end? Was she always going to suspect that every interest Jake had in another woman was romantic?"

The last book goes fast forward ten years. The core of the family moved with Constance, the black sheep, away from The Hague to Driebergen. It turns out in the first chapters already that three minot characters died. The real centre of the family is now Adrian/Addy, who has become a doctor and is married with children. Of course, his is not a happy marriage and a lot of this book revolves around this issue.

Book Three, Twilight of the Souls, focuses mostly on some minor characters. As a result, the overarching storyline gets lost a bit. This part is, however, also very eventful. The family is scattered apart more than ever, one brother ends up in a mental institute, multiple characters die (bodycount: 4) and, fully in the style of The Silent Force, the matriarch has visions of all disasters to come.

Book two, The Late Life, starts in a happy mood, despite the crisis that jnfolded at the end of the first book. However, the first drama occurs soon enough and the family relationships start to crack. Keeping up appearances becomes harder and harder to do.

Finished book one out of four. Couperus is brilliant in his use of language and manages, in all the formality of the story's character, to include humour and tension, eventually leading to the final crisis. He was called the Dutch Thackeray for a good reason.

Tough reading, but worth it.

“...the story of the foundation of Rome by refugees from Alba under the leadership of the sons of an Alban prince, Romulus and Remus, is nothing but a naive attempt of primitive quasi-history to explain the singular circumstance of the place having arisen on a site so unfavourable, and to connect at the same time the origin of Rome with the general metropolis of Latium.”

“let the torn poems sail from you like a flock
of white egrets in a long last sigh of release."