The morning before a meeting was attacked on a future asylum seekers’ center with smoke bombs, bang fireworks and flying eggs, everything is still quiet in Noordwijk. Opposite the luxurious Hotel Huis ter Duin (long the collection point of the Dutch national team) the sea wind blows along a banner: ‘AZC road with it! Vote PVV ‘. Two corners further – probably the route that Virgil van Dijk and Memphis Depay took when they searched for something readable for the long boring orange evenings – I find an asylum seeker, which is called: The asylum seeker. The box has a wonderful decoration, with Disney characters in a crib -free Christmas stations and – the most wonderful object of all – a stone on which the Austrian flag is painted.
Arnon Grunberg’s novel is in good company; from Kees van Kooten, One hundred years of loneliness And two more Grunbergs who apparently could not get a permanent residence permit indoors. Twenty -one years old The asylum seeker Again, although it is difficult to forget the short starting sentence: “The bird is sick.”
That bird is the wife of Beck, the main character of the novel. He is a writer, or actually an ex-writer who works as a translator of instructions. Beck is a man who has committed all the ambition that people continue to drive: “For years he tried to make himself happy, but that was a dead end.” He has renounced desires. “In any case, they were increasingly ridiculous, those desires of him, they were insects, that were an absolute, unaduversing,” they were unaduversed. “
Beck devotes himself to services for his dying woman. That means in the first place that she wants to get married, albeit not with him but with Raf, an Algerian asylum seeker. (The asylum seeker from the title, although you have to add that the others in the book are at least as displaced as Raf.)
For example, he ends up in an improvised bed under the coat rack where he listens to “the sounds of happiness” coming from his own bedroom. Grunberg plays smoothly the comic possibilities of this unusual triumvirate, which will move to a goat farm in France. For example, there is a scene in which Beck is bent over the toilet bowl (“two flies in”) and the asylum seeker-naked, also-comes in and asks: “Are you praying.” Beck: “I am about to surrender.”
Praying or vomiting? The contradiction fits in with the banal-minded scene, but those words also mean something, especially in a novel about a man fighting against illusions. Grunberg also leads you through the past of Beck, who has not yet cure his illusions ten years earlier, in the Israeli city of Eilat a prostitute has mistreated her by putting an eye in a concrete cellar. Grunberg writes about Beck’s debt: “As someone finds a knot and has a jacket made, he had searched and found a crime in his debt.”
Indeed, there is a lot in the novel. In her Grunberg study Abyss (The title comes out The asylum seeker) Yra van Dijk showed how apparently there can be read in the book: Sex and Violence, Holocaust, Love, guilt, MediaSchandal, Traumas and Michel Houellebecq). A novel so rich that he makes every bookcase burst.
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