Royce de Vries enjoys a preferential position in the media, but outside of that, not everyone has the same respect for the son of the famous Peter R. de Vries. “His work is extremely poor.”
As the son of Peter R. de Vries, he only has to snap his fingers or Khalid & Sophie and RTL Boulevard will fall in line: Royce de Vries’ media position is rock solid. He recently put out a new book and it was brought into these programs as a sort of thing breaking news. As the absolute opening item.
A lot of grumbling
The reason why these programs are so Royce-friendly is clear: he ran his law firm with Khalid Kasem for years and RTL Boulevard is the program where his father worked. But is all this attention for Royce’s book justified? Or is it all a little disappointing?
The well-known literary weblog Tzum asks whether Royce’s book, I promise you I’ll live to be a hundred, will be ‘the big joke of the year’. “So far the booksellers have remained a bit quiet, but we are hearing a lot of grumbling about the book from various anonymous sources.”
100,000 copies
The publisher, De Arbeiderspers, printed 100,000 copies in advance, but did not reveal which book it would be. “Many bookstores bought the book based on the literary reputation of De Arbeiderspers and were somewhat disappointed that a crime book was rolled into the store,” says Tzum.
Roos Custers, who works at the Godert Walter bookstore in Groningen, in the podcast Reading is Vurrukkulluk strong criticism. “All it said was that all bookstores would have to pre-purchase this book on a large scale. ‘We just don’t say who the author is.’”
‘Very disappointed’
It turned out to be the diary of Peter R. de Vries. “Supplemented with notes from his son, who is named after a car,” Roos sneers.
Does the book score well? “On the contrary. At Godert Walter we were somewhat disappointed that the 20 ordered copies did not directly match the store’s range. But also, I’ve leafed through that book, I’ve read the back cover, that doesn’t make me very happy…”
Poorly written
It’s a really bad book, Roos thinks. “It is written in a very poor way by the son who is named after a car. It contains pictures of: ‘This is a photo of my wedding day’, ‘This is the woman, I am nothing as a man without her’. That kind of… Yeah.”
The presenter: “And that for the socialist-literary publisher De Arbeiderspers!”