Vonne van der Meer (b. 1952) has written fourteen novels, several short story collections, novellas and plays. The novel Eilandgasten (Island Guests, 1999) and the two sequels De avondboot (The Evening Boat, 2001) and Laatste seizoen (Last Season, 2002) introduced her to a large audience. She has received widespread acclaim for her lightness of tone and her vividly drawn characters. Personal Injury, too, has been very well-received by the press.
(Contact, 1991, 143 pages)
In one of Vonne van der Meer’s short stories, De oude vrouw en de jonge man, ‘The Old Woman and the Young Man’, a Dutch woman celebrates her seventieth birthday alone in an outdoor cafe in Madrid. ‘When she was alone she had no age:’ A handsome young Spaniard who tries to sell her two tickets for a bullfight offers to accompany her himself when he learns that she is alone.
(Contact, 1999, 206 pages)
In what is by now the extensive oeuvre of Vonne van der Meer, islands occupy a place of prominence. Her characters visit islands in search of peace and quiet, and are then compelled by the isolation to reflect on their lives. On an island, we learn from her new book, everything happens for the first time. Eilandgasten takes place in a holiday house on an island off the coast of Holland called Vlieland. The scheme of the novel, which is brilliant in its simplicity, enables the author to incorporate six very different stories, or mini-dramas. Each chapter introduces a new tenant or tenants; the holiday house is the principal thread that runs through them.
(Contact, 2001, 203 pages)
In her successful novel Eilandgasten (Island Guests), Vonne van der Meer had her characters arriving at a holiday home on the Dutch island of Vlieland, where their stories were set: six different stories, but all with a common location. The idea of telling the stories of a cottage’s guests is too good to be exhausted after just one book. After all, an island is an island; you cannot leave just like that.
(Contact, 2004, 176 pages)
In I’ll Put You Through Vonne van der Meer shows what huge consequences small acts can lead to. The story takes place on 10 September 2002, one day before the first commemoration of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York.
(Contact, 2009, 168 pages)
Vonne van der Meer is clever at revealing the little frictions within everyday human intercourse and this places her at a lonely altitude in the Dutch-speaking world. Zondagavond (Sunday Evening) is more plot-driven that her other novels but it too involves a secret that a man has borne within him for far too long. It is an intelligent, subtle novel.
(Atlas Contact, 2013, 218 pages)
Vonne van der Meer came to fame with a series of successful and award-winning novels set on the holiday island of Vlieland. Her great strength lies in describing the lives of ordinary people who hide their inner struggles beneath a tranquil surface. This is no less true of The Narrow Path of Love, the story of two couples, one of which lost a child years earlier.
(Atlas Contact, 2019, 240 pages)
At the end of the 1950s, the young Jutka Horvath finds a woman’s handbag and returns it to its rightful owner. As a reward, she receives a book about a boy who loses his plastic fish only to find it back years later. From then on, Jutka makes it her mission to find lost items and return them to their owners. She becomes the ‘findling’.
(Atlas Contact, 2022, 108 pages)
A young woman ends up in a wheelchair due to a manufacturing defect in her skis. Her lawyer pursues the highest possible compensation. It’s a straightforward conceit that Vonne van der Meer takes into an unexpected direction. In Personal Injury, the way we see ourself clashes with the view of outsiders. Who or what determines the value of an unlived life?
