Before she discovered her big passion in life, writing, Marleen Westera (b. 1962) spent many years working in health care. Suddenly, however, they were there, Sheep and Goat. They were having an argument in the field one morning and from that moment on they have held the writer in their grip.
(Lemniscaat, 2004, 123 pages)
No one led more a boring life than Sheep and Goat. Imagine: just the two of them in a field where nothing happens, the high point of their day being a bunch of hay or a dandelion. Who’d write a book about that? Marleen Westera, the most welcome Dutch newcomer of 2004! In her debut Schaap en Geit (Sheep and Goat) Westera gets under these farm animals’ hides and wonders whether, despite their proverbial gentleness, they wouldn’t drive each other up the wall. And they do. In the first story, they decide they can’t carry on any longer. ‘One of us has to go’, says Sheep. No more bickering about who’s going to get the best grass! ‘I’ll go’, says Goat, who thinks that the world…
