Three siblings, two boys and a girl, grow up struggling with the grief of having lost their parents in a car crash at a young age. They were sent to different foster homes and did not see each other for nine years. Now reunited as young adults, they each struggle with their grief and separation differently. The narrator, in particular, has almost no memories of the years before the foster homes and he is constantly pressuring his twin sister to tell him stories of their youth. He gets more and more confused as to what are his memories and what are his memories of her stories. And, for good reason, he becomes more and more suspicious of the stories she tells him.
The title alternately refers to grief and a longing for those lost, but also for a longing for memories. “All that’s left is the memory,” she [his twin sister] says, “and the memory’s not enough, the memory is one great longing.” “Gradually I realized that Raph’s [his older brother] sense of loss stemmed from bereavement, and mine, from longing.” Its focus on memory reminds me of Julian Barnes’ writings.
His sister has an on-again, off-again husband who is a philosophy grad student. His purpose seems to be to bring in existential commentary on modern life from the French philosophers.
This is an “environmental novel” in that the environment, in this case an urban environment, is so strongly featured in the story that it is almost another character. This urban environment isn’t pretty: the narrator uses the term “total decrepitude.” Since the book is translated from the Dutch, we assume this is Amsterdam, or another big Dutch city. All three of the siblings live in what geographers would call the zone of decay – the down-and-out fringe of many downtowns consisting of dilapidated and vandalized buildings -- factories, warehouses and old residences. The only use for most of these abandoned buildings seems to be for the psychedelic club scene with ear-shattering music. A good line describing someone he meets in a club: “She looked like someone who’d been put together out of the parts of three or four different people.”
There are two intermissions with starkly contrasting environments. Right after they are reunited as young adults, the two brothers spend a year on the road bumming around, living hand-to-mouth, doing odd jobs on farms and factories. Later the main character gets a job in total isolation for three months, monitoring scientific measurements at an abandoned drilling site during a severe winter.
All-in-all a good read and a very different book from another of this author’s I have reviewed: In a Dark Wood. Dark Wood is largely a historical novel of Jewish history in the Netherlands.
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