HET GROTE ZWIJGEN (tHE GREAT SILENCE)

 

LONGLISTED FOR THE GOuDEN BOEKENUIL PRIZE 2012

 

NOMINATED FOR THE SELEXYZ DEBUT PRIZE 2011

Amsterdam 2010. During a performance of composer Alphons Diepenbrock’s latest composition, a reviewer is overwhelmed by the music. Diepenbrock’s wife suggests they invite the young journalist to their home when she reads his glowing review the next day. So begins the story of a turbulent friendship that will end dramatically seven years later. A friendship between teacher and pupil who share everything with each other; their ideas about business and art, new music, their hatred of Germany, their fear of war. Mathijs Vermeulen is at the start of his career as journalist and composer. Alphons Diepenbrock is nearly fifty, at the peak of his career, in love with his mistress, friends with Gustav Mahler and the director Willem Mengelberg. It is Alphons’ wife, Elisabeth, who drives a wedge between the two. In Vermeulen she sees the ambition and ideals her husband seems to have lost; in him she thinks she finds the love her marriage lacks. And then the First World War breaks out. Vermeulen departs to act as a war correspondent on the front in Belgium. On his return, his horrifying experiences send his friendship with the Diepenbrocks into turmoil.

‘HET GROTE ZWIJGEN moved me, and that doesn’t happen to me often with books...  The book has a beautiful, almost nostalgic feel of Amsterdam a hundred years ago, when the polder practically bordered the Concertgebouw. The novel gives an insight into the Diepenbrock-Mahler relationship, into the later conflict Diepenbrock-Vermeulen, reveals a great deal about Willem Mengelberg’s character and the struggles in musical form of the time... I learnt a great deal from this book.’ Cees Nooteboom, NRC Handelsblad

‘Erik Menkveld, acclaimed poet, and now also novelist, shows himself in his debut novel HET GROTE ZWIJGEN to be anything but a debutant...  a rich feeling for language and fine ear for rythm.’ De Groene Amsterdammer

‘Apart from being a beautiful novel about artists, in which all the nitty gritty of life is shown, it is also a philosophical novel in which today’s art can find comparisons.’ Tirade

‘The poet Erik Menkveld has written a beautiful, controlled historical novel.. For hours you are delightfully cloaked in the first years of the twentieth century.  The porters at the train stations, the gaslamps in hotel rooms, the novelty of shaved armpits. Menkveld uses everything to make the Netherlands of the time come vividly to life.’ BOEK

 

Sales

 

Uitgeverij van Oorschot NL

Material: Dutch edition: (383pp).