OSCAR VAN DEN BOOGAARD

LIEFDESDOOD (LOVE’S DEATH)

"She tries to piece it all together later. The little feet reaching for the bottom so as to get a good thrust upward, kicking, still kicking. Before the body can rise up to the light of the world, the treetops, the month of August, the summer holiday, the days to come, the surprises, the things you will not be spared, the things you have to deal with so as to put them behind you - before then her last breath will have preceded her in a thousand tiny bubbles... perhaps inhaled by a bird, a squirrel, or a stick insect." LOVE'S DEATH is about the search for an ideal family. At the novel's centre is the death of a child and the devastating and destructive effect of this event on parents, friends, and lovers.

In the summer of 1973, Oda and Paul Klein's eight-year-old daughter, Vera, drowns in the neighbours' pool. Paul flees his grief by taking a military posting in Surinam. Seven years later, when he returns, a mysterious fire burns down the neighbours' house, and a young girl appears out of the flames. She is fifteen, as Vera would now have been. Paul and Oda agree to take her in temporarily - feeling as if they have been given another chance to form a family. Finally, in the last part of this brief, searing novel, Paul's friend Emil reveals the central role he has played in the Kleins' lives. Oscar van den Boogaard is a masterful stylist. At once poetic and gripping, LOVE'S DEATH never loosens its hold on the reader, from the first painful scene by the pool to the final revelations...

Published by: Querido NL; Farrar, Straus USA; Sabine Wespieser Editeur France; Fischer Verlag Germany. Rights also sold to: Seix Barral Spain; Lagoudera Greece.

PRESS REVIEWS:

"A destroyed family and an artfully concealed secret history are laid bare with near-surgical precision in this superbly constructed 1999 novel... by one of Holland's most accomplished and respected writers." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Stylistically, Love's Death is astounding. Boogaard deftly stretches out time through acute attention to every detail, mirroring the attempts of the characters to keep ahold of something in the present. The narrative is told almost entirely in the present tense and at times with such sparseness, such directness, that the sense of loss permeating the text is truly experienced by the reader. ...more of Boogaard's work should find its way into English translation." Review of Contemporary Fiction

"As van den Boogaard's title suggests, this is a novel about the death of love, but as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that that death is not limited to the love between Paul and Oda, and that the death of a little girl was the catalyst for others deaths of love, as well. Which is worse, Paul's friend Emil asks: the death of a child or the death of love? The two are inseparable in this book, and never more so than at its surprising conclusion.

Van den Boogaard's minimalist style is the perfect vehicle for his message. Translated from the Dutch by Ina Rilke, his sentences are unadorned, spare, cool, even icy. One follows the next without ceremony. They create the impression of a universe devoid of affect and of affectation. What is amazing... is how convincing he is." The Denton Times

"Reading this chilly novel... is like chewing ice - jarring yet compulsively satisfying at the same time." St Petersburg Times

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