Wanda Reisel (b. 1955) studied dramaturgy and made her literary debut in 1986 with Jacobi’s tocht (Jacob’s Journey)followed two years later by the novel Het blauwe uur (The Blue Hour). Deception and self-deception are recurring themes in her novels, stories and plays. Baby Storm (1996) and Een man een man (A Man a Man, 2000) were both shortlisted for the Libris Prize for Literature. White Love (2004) was shortlisted for the AKO Literature Prize and won the Anna Bijns Prize (2008).
(Querido, 1988)
De jonge advocate Emy Andersen probeert na de dood van haar vriend Arthur, drie jaar terug, haar leven weer op orde te krijgen. Maar als ze door stom toeval op het spoor komt van een vriendje uit haar jeugd, raakt ze meer en meer aan hem verslingerd. Adriaan Karton leidt een leven dat Emy aantrekt als een verterend vuur.
(Querido, 1993, 190 pages)
Fax messages, monologues, dialogues, descriptions: on the face of it Wanda Reisel’s new novel appears to have a rather unclear structure. Upon reading what the protagonist Vera Aleksander says about herself, however, the reader understands why Reisel has opted for a fragmentary composition: ‘I am an enigma to myself, alien to myself, unknown. I have to rediscover time and again how to fit my presence into the joints of this world. I keep coming from another corner, baffling myself, totally unreliable really.’ The story told here similarly ‘keeps coming from another corner’.
(Contact, 2010, 221 pages)
It was a monumental five-storey building with sixteen rooms and a garden bordering on the Vondelpark in Amsterdam: a large, fairytale house in which you could meander to your heart’s content. The writer Wanda Reisel and her parents, brothers and sisters lived in such a house between 1961 and 1974. It was a period in which the Second World War cast a shadow over the young family (several of the Jewish family members had not returned from the war), without explicit reference to this ever being made. That was also the case with the death of the eldest son on Curaçao, a few years before the family came to live in Amsterdam. At the same time, the freedom of the sixties began to make itself…
(Atlas Contact, 2019, 360 pages)
Wanda Reisel tells the story of a young man who, after witnessing an attack on the war monument in Amsterdam’s Dam Square, hears a voice telling him: ‘You have to change your life. Don’t look back.’ But is that really possible when you’re trying to flee? The faster you run from the past, the harder it is to escape your memories.
