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HENK VAN WOERDEN
WINNER OF DE GOUDEN UIL 2006
ULTRAMARINE (ULTRAMARIJN)
NOMINATED FOR THE LIBRIS PRIZE
WINNER OF THE INKTAAP 2007 (selected by students from three
books that have already been awarded major prizes)
Van Woerden's new novel is set somewhere between east and west, in a
cultural borderland. Joakim, grows up in the 1950’s in an obscure
port on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. With the bustle and
the fissures of a smalll cosmopolitan town as a backdrop, the impressionable
Joakim develops a passion for his half-sister Aysel, a flamboyant and
self-determined young woman with a penchant for cuisine and risky love
affairs. When they are found out, he is banished to a boy’s camp.
Being sent away among men is his worst nightmare and turns out to be
irreversible. When he returns to the town a pogrom has taken place with
scores of people killed. Aysel is missing, presumed dead. These events
set him on course for a career as a lute-player and singer in the concert
halls – and ultimately in the seedy dives – of the capital.
Aysel has survived the riots; she has been transported to the suburbs
of a bleak German city ‘to be forgotten among strangers’.
In a delicately woven parallel account of their two lives, Van Woerden
sketches a landscape of desire, art and politics in the classical sense.
Will circumstances ever bring them together? On the surface a story
of love and longing, beneath the skin, however, it is a haunting account
of the history of the eastern Mediterranean in the latter half of the
twentieth century: the imminent loss of a great culinary and non-western
musical tradition as well as the defeat of a sensuality based on melancholy;
the impending gain of polluted beaches, popular visual culture, and
turboprop sex. Joakim the once famed musician ends up in a seaside hotel
with twelve rooms, in each of which he has bedded a tourist –
both men and women - for whom he felt no particular yearning; yearning
has become a thing of the past, that is: until ‘she’ turns
up.
ULTRAMARIJN provides a scintillating
evocation of the eastern Mediterranean in the second half of the
twentieth century, eventually reuniting the lost lovers in a way
that elevates the novel to near mythical status. A kaleidoscopic
story of broad scope, evocative, wistful and sensual too.
Material: Finished copies (288
pages)
Sales: Podium NL (original publisher); Actes Sud France;
Ullstein Buchverlage Germany; Tiderne Skifter Denmark;Gyldendal
Norsk Norway; Mlada Fronta Czech Republic; Shanghai Publishing
China; Everest Turkey.
‘It is thrilling how close a novel
can come to reality. This is not just a painful and beautiful
book, it is also a necessary one.’ Parool |
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‘Van Woerden writes with an effortless
ease that contains everything: finesse, narrative, warmth and wisdom.
Captivatingly powerful, this is a book of unparalleled beauty, precise
and penetrating. It is a novel so rich, so perfect, a novel that demands
to be reread and that will continue giving meaning and revealing secrets
for all time. Simply masterful.’ Financieel Dagblad
‘Van Woerden invests his book with a
sort of universal primal force. He searches for more than interpersonal
explanations – he touches the unknowable, the mysterious. It makes
his book wonderful, intriguing, and, at times, a little beyond our grasp.’
Trouw
'If Van Woerden intended this book to be his
masterpiece, he can be reassured. An intense novel that provokes thought
and wonder.' NRC Handlesblad
NOTES FROM AN AIR CYCLIST (NOTITIES
CAN EEN LUCHTFIETSER)
Van Woerden's new book considers travel in the mind as much
as in 'reality'. Every journey is somehow already prepared for,
as if it has a blueprint in the soul. In this way we visit Nantes,
New York, Oudtshoorn, Isfahan, or Enschede. Simultaneously,
however, Van Woerden takes us through the intriguing lands of
fantasy, on the hunt for the meaning of homesickness, the expression
of 'national' feeling, and the influence of landscape on art.
Why did surrealism come from Brittany not Nebraska? Where can
you find the most beautiful tree house in the Lowlands? Can
a dog feel nostalgia, as a human being does? Written in Van
Woerden's inimitable style, this is a moving and often hilarious
book.
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A MOUTHFUL OF GLASS, TIKOES
& MOENIE KYK NIE FORM A TRILOGY ABOUT SOUTH AFRICA
A MOUTHFUL OF GLASS (EEN MOND
VOL GLAS)
Winner of the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award
& the Frans Kellendonk Prize 2003
In 1966 Demitrios Tsafendas killed
the South African premier Hendrik Verwoerd and while Verwoerd
went down in history as the architect of apartheid, his murderer
stayed in the shadows, until today. In this powerful book Henk
Van Woerden reconstructs the life of Tsafendas and gives a personal,
intimate and insider account of the South African trauma, then
and now.
Demitrios Tsafendas was born half-Greek, half-African,
in colonial Mozambique, a world defined by racial prejudice. Van
Woerden describes the man’s flight from country to country
and his failure to fit anywhere. He was Christian, communist,
Coloured, black, white. Rejection and disintegration went together;
by the end he was taking orders from creatures dwelling in his
body. He longed to belong. Was this his madness? Van Woerden unravels
the assassin’s strange, affecting history - the sad and
desperate life of a man who went everywhere and belonged nowhere.
This is a masterpiece that completely transcends
any obstacles of subject matter. |
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A fine piece of narrative writing, pared down to essentials,
balancing fact and imaginative recreation with great care and integrity.
The prose is beautiful and the story is one that never has been told
before culminating in an act that changed history. The stabbing of Hendrik
Verwoerd was one of the most important and dramatic political assassinations
in modern history.
Material: Manuscript (to be published
Autumn 2005)
Sales: Podium NL (original publisher); Granta
UK; Metropolitan USA; Queillerie South Africa; Gyldendal Norsk Norway;
Berlin Verlag & Lettre International Germany (extract); Tiderne
Skifter Denmark; Actes Sud France; Grijalbo Mondadori Spain; Temas e
Debates Portugal; Radio BBC World Service; Ancora del Mediterraneo Italy;
Kedros Greece.
Adapted as a play & directed by Sir Anthony Sher entitled
‘I.D’ at the Almeida in London.
'Only van Woerden would succeed in redefining
the country’s history in this way. He has managed to extricate
Tsafendas from obscurity, out of prevailing, shameful silence; so that
we may be acquainted with the man in all his particular humanity.' Breyten
Breytenbach
'A thoroughly successful blend of biography
and fiction, suggesting in intriguing ways how a new history of South
Africa can be written.' J. M. Coetzee
'It is a picture both astute and sickening,
both moving and grotesque, as the freedom of the two main players comes
to be defined more in terms of the only choice they have left - their
different kinds of madness.' Andre Brink
'This book is Tsafendas’ biography, but
it is also a work of exceptional imagination.' Justin Cartwright
TIKOES
In Tikoes Henk van Woerden weaves the relationships
together: one with a woman and one with a country. Against the chaotic
backdrop of south Africa the story unfolds of a seemingly frivolous
travel companion, realised by a narrator who stands between two continents.
The young Tikoes is no less
beautiful than the homeland, but both 'loves' are marked by a violent
past that sharpens the dilemma of the return.
‘An Amorous book.’ Henneke
Groenteman
’Van Woerden shows himself to be a writer who, in an almost laconic
manner, can tell glittering story, in a language that sparkles with
meaning and is evidence of great stylistic control.’ Jury
Libris Prize
’Documented reality is touched and recreated by the imagination
of a great writer.’ Elsbeth Etty
MOENIE KYK NIE
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of a Dutch family that emigrated to South Africa in the fifties.
The first person narrator is then nine years old. His mother dies
not long after their arrival in a land torn apart by the 'classical
apartheid', and his father starts a relationship with a younger
woman. As well as a portrait of displacement in the African land,
this novel is the history of an eye. The two different eyes of
the young protagonist - the blind one, missing; and the eagerly
observing one - give this moving story a distorted perspective,
which gradually begins to stand for the split personality of the
country.
’Moenie Kyk Nie needed to be written
exactly the way it is written, perfect
to the smallest detail. That's what makes it a dream debut.’
Elsbeth Etty
’Your pen is as good as your brush.’ Adriaan van
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Podium reissued Van Woerden’s brilliant debut novel MOENIE
KYK NIE in December 2000. MOENIE KYK NIE won the Geertjan Lubberhuizen
Prize and was shortlisted for the Libris and together with TIKOES
(to be reissued next year) form a trilogy of which MOUTHFUL OF
GLASS is the final part.
Published by Podium Holland; Granta UK; Metropolitan
USA; Kedros Greece; Queillerie South Africa; Gyldendal Norsk Norway;
Lettre International Germany (extract); Tiderne Skifter Denmark;
Actes Sud France; Grijalbo Mondadori Spain; Temas e Debates Portugal;
Radio BBC World Service; Ancora del Mediterraneo Italy
Theatrical rights sold to Sir Anthony Sher –
ALMEIDA THEATRE production adapted from ‘A MOUTHFUL OF GLASS’
entitled ‘I.D.’ opening in September 2003
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HENK VAN WOERDEN was born in the Netherlands
but spent his teenage years in South Africa in Cape Town. After his
return to the Netherlands he became a writer and an artist. He has published
TIKOES and MOENIE KYK NIE, which won the Geertjan Lubberhuizen Prize.
EEN MOND VOL GLAS was shortlisted for the GENERALE BANK PRIZE. The Frans
Kellendonk Prize is awarded once every three years to a writer in recognition
of the quality of his entire oeuvre. Van Woerden has contributed to
Granta, Lettre Internationale and NRC Handelsblad and is an internationally
acclaimed artist whose work hangs in several European museums.
Henk tragically passed away in his sleep on November
16th 2005 whilst based at the University of Michegan, Ann Arbour, where
he was writer in residence.
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