On her novel debut in 2015, the Flemish journalist Isabelle Rossaert (1966) received praise in this newspaper for her ‘fine, rhythmic’ sentences that created a ‘pleasant atmosphere’. She still possesses that skill, as appears from the collection of short stories And this will be over in a moment – needlessly dull title by the way. In the opening story, an adult daughter takes a cruise through the Mediterranean with her mother with dementia. The mother, as charming as before, has hallucinatory conversations with fellow passengers, is constantly lost on the ship and runs away at every port it visits.
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Beautiful tension between a mother and daughter, between a man and his ‘wife’
