Dutch novelist Moring's first novel to appear stateside, a lyrical, mildly existential tale of memory lost and refound, is set in an urban desert of stylized alienation. Sam van Djik, 30, has lost possession of his past and, accompanied by his twin sister and an eccentric older brother, sets out to find and regroup the scattered pieces. The origin of Sam's amnesia is the car accident that killed his parents in his early youth; as his slightly deranged and hypersensitive mind moves restlessly backward through time, it alights again and again upon images of his childhood, in particular those of his dead father and mother. Sam's trauma leads him into inconsequentiality in adulthood as he drifts aimlessly into the lackluster profession of archivist, living in an abandoned warehouse and trawling through a hip but curiously innocuous underworld. Moring's writing can be supple and momentarily intriguing, but it lacks the intensity or originality to give the meandering, whimsical plot depth-or even surface excitement. Sam seems too casual and even-tempered to have been truly traumatized, and so his memory loss seems more like a literary device than a gripping pathology. The narrative's cute urban-wasteland setting comes off as overdesigned, as well. If he fails to forge a novel of dynamic unpredictability, however, Moring does show that he is capable of more interesting work down the line.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this imaginative novel, Sam van Dijk has lived his life in an amnesiac fog (whether real or self-imposed is unclear). After Sam's parents were killed in a car accident when he was a child, he moved through a series of foster homes. His surroundings became a blur, and the people remained slightly out of focus. As a young adult, Sam is reunited with his brother and twin sister. His brother seems determined to forget the past, but his sister, in stark contrast to Sam, is determined to chronicle it. Sam finds work as an archivist, carefully and tediously piecing together company histories from documents and memorabilia, all the while unable to reconstruct his own history from fragments of memory and snatches of conversations. Part mystery, part existential tract, this novel won the equivalent of the Booker Prize in Moring's native Holland, where the book was a best seller. For serious literature collections.?Peggie Partello, Keene State Coll., N.H.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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