Snag The Detour Assembled By Gerbrand Bakker Format Kindle
in spare beautiful language, "Ten White Geese" is a captivating book in a very quiet way, A woman leaves the Netherlands, and obtains a shortterm lease on an isolated Welsh farm house with a view of Mount Snowdon, The home is surrounded by meadows, a lake, and overgrown walking paths, She has been fired from her job at the university for having an affair with a student, Her marriage is troubled. She seems unwell, and regularly uses painkillers, She's disappeared from her old life, and now calls herself Emilie since the subject of her PhD thesis had been Emily Dickinson,
Emilie finds some comfort in working in the gardens and clearing the walking paths, She rarely sees another person and her days are spent with nature, with the land, She's observing the badgers and the neighbor's grazing cows and sheep, And she watches the ten white geese which are disappearing one by one, . . maybe a fox is the nighttime predator, Emilie feels the presence of the ghost of Mrs Evans, the previous owner who recently died, and smells an "old lady smell" sometimes in the house, The spirit of Emily Dickinson is also presentthe poet who stayed isolated in her later years,
Emilie avoids interactions with other people, but a few things are revealed about her previous life by what she saysor does not say, She's run away from her former life, but is making no attempt to start a new life, The psychological suspense builds from her unusual reactions to people,
Hints about Emilie and others are dropped as the story slowly unfolds, but many questions are left unanswered at the end, Gerbrand Bakker, who also works as a gardener, writes beautifully about the rhythm of the day and the lovely natural world, Although there is little dialogue and very little plot, this haunting story will keep the reader thinking long after they have turned the last page, It is no surprise that a book about a scholar deeply immersed in the work of Emily Dickinson is also about death, The titular ten geese, by the end of this book, number only four, But this book is about deception, too, and perception love, and relationships nature, and gardens, We pass two months in Wales but every season is accounted for, Gerbrand Bakker has created a knotty piece of fine art for us to contemplate,
We never learn how old she is, Agnes, or Emily as she liked to be called, We know she is probably at the end of childbearing age, so desperately had she tried to conceive, She is an intellectual, writing a dissertation on the poems of Emily Dickinson, that poet she must have once admired but grew to resent, She is ill. We learn that early, along with her sense of being stuck, and unsure in which direction to go,
She arrives in Wales alone, escaping the failures of her past, She walks. One day a badger bites her foot as she lies sunbathing on a rock, Not long after, Bradwen, a boy, and Sam, his dog, stumble into her yard and stay, But statements about events are foreplay here, for there is undertone and atmosphere and references and indications which are more of the book than the story itself.
Like poetry, perhaps
After her encounter with the badger, Emily pulls out her copy of The Wind in the Willows, one of the main characters of which is a badger.
The book is mentioned again when Bradwen takes it from the house on his departure, That The Wind in the Willows is mentioned more than once cannot be coincidence, But why that book
Perhaps we are to draw light comparisons between Emily and Toad for she is at her happiest in the bath makes a mash of her career alienates and betrays those close to her is “on the run.
” Bradwen might be Rat, for he carried a backpack and simply takes what he needs for his journeys, offering friendship to Toad when he needs it most, and is locked up while Toad makes his escape.
Bradwen is a curious figure whom we cant see as a reliable character, He lies by omission, as does “Emily, ” He never tells Emily who his father is and how he came to stay in this place, but clearly he is at home in it, He is willing to make meals in exchange for a bed, He shares a comforting, unerotic coupling with Emily, filled more with silence than sound, and worries ever after that his generosity might add to her burdens,
Sam the dog might be Mole, who accompanies Rat and finds the badger, A badger is a solitary creature “who simply hates society”perhaps the reclusive Ms, Dickinson herselfclever, generous, and welcoming when another comes to visit, but must be sought out, Friendly but fearful and elusive, the badger and doesnt ever seem to come when called, Dickinson was apparently better known as a gardener while she was living than for writing poetry, Does this draw a line from Bakker to Dickinson, and badgers
Gerbrand Bakker writes with a clarity and a depth that borders on knowledgeabout pain, confusion, hurt, alienation, even sickness unto deathand in the voice of a woman.
“Im a strange man, maybe, but I think there is no fundamental difference between men and women, A lot of people would say otherwise, perhaps, ” sitelinkNPR interview, This point of view may come from his training as a gardener, Humans of either sex are the same species: one sex has basically the same wants, needs, desires as the otherour differences dont define our essential character, That having been said, this was a woman apart and in exquisite pain, I recognize her, but I hope I never meet am her,
Ach. Gerbrand Bakkers book refuses to leave me, In the same seven minute sitelinkNPR interview mentioned above, Bakker says that the process of writing this novel precipitated in him a great depression, I am not surprised. But literature can make us think about what man is, and Bakker doesn't leave us bereft,
A panoply of the senses, Pensive, reflective, and moving. Beautiful.
A woman rents a remote greystone farmhouse in Wales, She has left her husband, needing time to herself, limiting her world, making it small, Nature, the quiet, the colors, the sounds of water, A old woman scent hangs in the air, is it residual or current A painfully shy badger, who shows itself only to her, A gaggle of white geese, softly clucking, disappearing one by one, This is an odd book, in that I found it a compelling read and yet at the same time I was not particularly interested in the end in what the outcome was, only that I should reach that outcome.
It is often difficult to judge the writing of an author who has been translated, Is it the author or translator being judged Bakker writes in a flat way, He captures an air of mystery and sometimes menace, of loneliness and despair, Yet he failed, for me anyway, to develop any real interest in the characters or their predicament, I also at times found his sentences a little jarring and choice of paragraphs odd but this settled down after a while,
I suspect this is one of those books that some people will love, but it did not work for me, If this is what Bakker's writing is like, I will not read another, On the other hand, it has something as I read it in two sittings so he pulled me in, even if I did not enjoy the process of being pulled in.
Ample make this bed
Ample make this bed,This beautiful, beautiful book, a novel with the intimate feel of a novella, opens with a twostanza poem by Emily Dickinson, "Ample make this bed.
Make this bed with awe
In it wait till judgment break
Excellent and fair,
Be its mattress straight,
Be its pillow round
Let no sunrise' yellow noise
Interrupt this ground,
" It closes with a translation of the same poem into Dutch, By the time we reach the end, we have taken possession of the epigraph, fully understanding its relevance to the wholeand why the protagonist, a youngish Dutch Dickinson scholar named Emilie, needed to translate it into her own language, to take that possession, to make it personal to her.
Dickinson's poetic style, deceptively simple diction hiding profound thoughts, is also true of Bakker, whose short chapters and clean declarative sentences pack an insidious emotional heft,
If this sounds too airyfairy, turn to the facts, The setting is NW Wales, a little south of Caernarfon, nestling by the western slope of Snowdon, Wales's highest mountain, The young Dutch scholar has rented an isolated farmhouse at the far end of a milelong lane, In one of her fields are ten white geese that slowly begin disappearing, prey perhaps to foxes, Flocks of sheep or herds of cows appear in other fields from time to time, though she knows nothing about that, The location and countryside is so precisely described that you can easily locate the area on a map, walk where she walks, and see what she sees, including the shy badgers that for some reason appear to her but are seldom seen by others.
The recurrent landscape and animal references are clearly intentional there is something instinctual in Emilie's escape here also, like an animal going to ground,
I must be cautious in describing the human parts of the story, because Bakker is masterly in how he parcels out information, We soon learn that Emilie has come to Wales at short notice from Holland, leaving both her husband and her former job at a university, Her need for solitude in Wales is matched by the combined curiosity and suspicion in the few locals that she meets, Only two people visit her house: one a local sheep farmer whom she immediately sees as an enemy, the other a young man of around twenty called Bradwen.
He is as sensitive and caring as the older man is surly, and the blossoming of their relationship though seldom in obvious ways is largely responsible for the beauty that suffuses the latter half of the book.
In
thinking about how to avoid spoilers, I have come to realize one of the most extraordinary aspects of Bakker's novel, It is full of secrets and minor revelations, and yet at the same time it also seems preordained, a natural process that you just wait to be played out.
I don't think I have ever before experienced the curious combination of emotions I felt as various forces all come together towards a climax in the last fifty pages of the book: perched on the edge of my chair to learn what would happen next, yet all the time feeling this was right, right, right.
Absolutely one of my top books of the year so far, The only thing that might have made it even more enjoyable would have been to read it in the British edition, The book and the excellent translation by David Colmer are the same the title, The Detour, is less evocative, though closer to the Dutchbut there is that magnificent cover which is even truer to Bakker's spare elegance.
Prachtig. Sobere schrijfstijl. Echt Gerbrand Bakker, een van mijn favoriete schrijvers, Afstandelijk en onpersoonlijk waardoor de eenzaamheid en machteloosheid van de hoofdpersoon aan alle kanten van de bladzijden spat, Voor mij blijft Boven is het stil absoluut zijn beste boek, maar dit is ook een aanrader, The Detour/
This is a book by a Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker, whose previous book The Twinwon the International Dublin Literary Award, The Detour also known as Ten White Geese, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, is about a Dutch woman who moves from her country and starts to live alone on a farm in rural Wales.
Some of her nearby neighbours are badgers, cows and ten white geese whose number declines rapidly and mysteriously the longer she lives on her rented farm, Equipped with a poetry book by Emily Dickinson, the woman seems to be on the run from her past, trying to either delay or solve her immediate problems by seeking refuge in an unknown and isolated location.
Her peace is soon disturbed by those with curiosity and inquisitiveness, With elegance and delicacy, Bakker draws on the nature in his book to shed light on the mystery that is this woman and her past, with his book becoming a quiet and poignant exploration of loneliness, pain and human connection.
Bakker admitted that he writers “instinctively” and that is definitely felt in his novels they do have this feeling of coming straight from the heart.
Bakker explores personal past, grief and attempts to connect to others through his vivid descriptions of nature and animals, Situating a character within the nature domain provides a special emotional resonance and perspective, There is a strange and quiet immediacy to the authors writing and, as we read The Detour, we soon begin to care for this woman who calls herself Emilie what could have brought her to this secluded place in a foreigntoher country where she does not know anyone
The farm and the house where Emilie starts to live are special places which emphasise the meaninglessness of time.
Emilies rented farm is located near some ancient stone circle, a “timeless” place where people went to reconnect with their ancestors and forget their everyday concerns, The secluded farm is exactly the place where one can draw strength from the soil, seek solace in nature, and become attuned to it and its sounds.
While on the farm, Emilie forgets the passage of time and becomes directionless, She does not have any clock in her house and, soon, senses the uncertainty of everyday existence: “she senses how vulnerable people are when they have no idea what to do next, how to move forward or back” Bakker/Colmer,/:.
Sleep becomes another refuge for Emilie: “how pleasant that was, sleep, How separate from everything else, How free from the things that worry people when theyre not sleeping, the things that scare them, the things that loom before them like a mountain” Bakker/Colmer,/:.
Wine and nostalgia for the past are her other medications: “There was a sweet and spicy quality to the smell of the burning wood that made her think of the homemade borstplaat and speculaas her grandmother used to make and bring to their flat in the Rustenburgerstraat” Bakker/Colmer,/:.
Only the disappearing geese near her farm signal the passage of time and substitute a ticking clock, but their disappearing number also signals the irreversible loss, the loss that Emilie is unable to prevent.
In the story, Emilie soon has human company but will they provide the needed relief for her, and what about her husband who soon hires a private investigator to track his wife down Apart from Emilie and hew new neighbours, her past seems to be devoid of identity and we hear of “the husband” or his “parentsinlaw”, but never of their names as though their identities are meaningless and do not matter.
What really matters in this book is Emilies “present now”, this hour, this minute and this second of her life,
Bakker is his best when his book flows with the quiet descriptions of nature, and his dramatisations and dialogues have the touch of artificiality in them.
Although too slow, the book is never tedious as the author strikes a delicate balance between concealing and revealing, and there is a feeling that we are slowly heading to an unpredictable climax in The Detour.
We do get to know more about Emilie, and her past and present situations through the conversations that her husband has with his parentsinlaw in Holland and through Emilies own images of the past resurfacing.
The Detour wields a strange power barely perceivable, but heartfelt, The book has a special poignancy to it, slowly becoming the work of quiet beauty and conviction, .