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Her two subsequent novels De vriendschap (The Friendship, 1995) and I.M. (1998) followed her debut onto the bestsellers list. She went on to publish Geheel de uwe (Sincerely Yours, 2004), Lucifer (2007) and Logboek van een onbarmhartig jaar (Log Book of a Merciless Year, 2011). Palmen has also written several collections of essays, like Een kleine filosofie van de moord (A Short Philosophy of Murder, 2004) and Het geluk van de eenzaamheid (The Joy of Loneliness, 2009). She was awarded the AKO Literature Prize for De vriendschap and the Libris Literature Prize for You Said It. Her work has been translated into twenty languages.

Connie Palmen

The relationship between pupil and mentor turns out to be ambiguous in the extreme. While the teachers pass on their knowledge to Marie, each assigning her a different role and a new identity in the stories they tell about the world, she causes them to undergo a metamorphosis in return.In the guise of the biblical Eve, with whom she identifies, Marie makes off with their knowledge for use in her own story.She appropriates material from the books she reads or from discussions at university.The epileptic, for instance, is based on Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and the artist is derived from The Apology of Socrates by Plato. Marie is motivated by the temptations of forbidden knowledge and the search for hidden meanings.Like all Palmen’s characters, she has an almost obsessive desire for knowledge that might help her to explain herself and the world, and indeed to convey her ideas. The Laws does not reveal the secret of literary creation, but as a novel it certainly comes close.

'The Laws' is a triumph not of meaning, but of mystery. This duality gives it a singularity that sweetens and embitters, that spices the tale with the promise of paradox and surprise. It is a bracing fictional debut.

Book

Fiction

Asset

Assets

De wetten

Connie Palmen’s alter ego Marie Deniet, the central character of her debut novel, sets out in search of concepts such as identity and the origins of the story. Her quest is described through meetings with seven men who each have a specific form of knowledge and experience: an astrologer, an epileptic, a philosopher, a priest, a physicist, an artist and a psychiatrist.

The Laws

Three years after her internationally acclaimed best-seller De wetten (The Laws), Connie Palmen has once again created an attractive body with which to express her concerns. The first two hundred pages of De vriendschap tell the story of two women’s friendship. The book’s third and final section puts this friendship in a new light while also exposing how easy it is for a reader to be misled once the emotions are engaged. The writer sends the reader back to the beginning and first principles. Indeed, the whole book is a literary expression of philosophical thought, initially disguised as a story about two women, later becoming a straightforward letter. Can De vriendschap in its entirety be seen as a letter to the unknown reader?

Perceptively and precisely written (…), witty and compelling. It is sometimes said that the second book by an author who has been so praised for her first can only disappoint, this book vigorously rebuts that saying.

The story opens in a rural village in the sixties. Kit, the main character, talks about her friendship with Ara. Kit is small and skinny, and devours books. Ara is big, fat and dyslexic. The former has to read and think (and drink greedily) to acquire insight, the latter is led by her intuition (and eats greedily). For all Kit’s dependence, she never devotes herself completely to others. After all, that would be surrendering freedom of choice.In her characteristically aphoristic style, Connie Palmen shows how, after much struggle and confusion, Kit finally realizes that body and mind, free choice and fate are inseparably linked. As are the two friends. And because of Palmen’s inimitable writing style, Kit’s studies are truly of general concern.

A brilliant novel of ideas with a surprising tone. Her secret lies in her way of combining literature with philosophy.

'De vriendschap' is a mercilessly philosophical book. There is nothing remotely like it.

De vriendschap

A thirty-year-old psychologist-philosopher recoils from the indigestible and inaccessible language of academia. Instead of her dissertation she writes a letter to her bosom friend. Her studies concern everyone, not just an elite. ‘Writing is giving your mind another body,’ she writes, ‘so why shouldn’t that body be an attractive one?’ This twenty-page literary letter is the surprising conclusion of the three-part novel 'De vriendschap'.

The Friendship

Palmen becomes the chronicler of her own tragic love. The reader witnesses the moving account of a ‘terrible love story, because a great love simply does to this man and woman what all great loves have always done, by forcing them to confront the other side of their love, the pain, the anxieties and the helplessness.’ I.M. is a hymn to happiness that hurts and shows how the characters each overcome their fear of daring to know, and be known by, the other.With sober directness Palmen recreates the many conversations between herself and her lover. Both carry notebooks everywhere and are absorbed in their work. During their trips to America it is business as usual, with Palmen writing her second novel, Meijer his daily newspaper column. Love and work overlap. I.M. contains countless interesting literary-theoretical pronouncements on the complex relationship between mind and body, fiction and reality, anonymity and intimacy. As in her previous novels of ideas, the motto ‘Comprehension eases suffering’ is a constant thread.

'I.M.' is an intimate book, and in this kind of book there is always a danger of sentimentality. But not with Palmen. She is straightforward and moving, and in spurts writes the most beautiful passages.

Slowly but surely I.M. becomes primarily an analysis of the complex personality of Ischa Meijer. This intense, excitable man, whose extreme behaviour and merciless interviewing technique made him many friends, but also many enemies, is shown as struggling with a huge fear of abandonment. The story of his childhood speaks volumes: with his parents he survived Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and after a strict Jewish upbringing found himself, together with his brother and sister, rejected by them. And though he hates his parents, he will always be looking for them and writing about them. During their conversations, with moving persistence and a great desire for clarity, Palmen constantly tries to fathom the mechanisms of his fear of abandonment. The ending of I.M., the actual In Memoriam for Ischa Meijer, is heart-rending. Palmen is not there when ‘stupid, inexorable fate’ strikes, and the subject of I.M. presents itself. The writing can begin.

It is her best book. In her literary celebration Palmen makes life into literature and that in turn justifies life as it turned out.

I can’t remember ever reading such heartrending prose.

I.M.

Shortly after the publication of her first novel, 'De wetten' (The Laws, 1991), Connie Palmen met the notorious interviewer and journalist Ischa Meijer. It was love at first sight. The success of Palmen’s début and her love affair with a celebrity made her a public figure overnight. February 1995 saw the appearance of her second novel 'De vriendschap', but a few weeks previously fate had struck a dreadful blow when Ischa Meijer died of a heart attack. Palmen’s new documentary novel 'I.M.' (Ischa Meijer, In Memoriam, In Margine) covers these four years of her life.

This is not Palmen’s first examination of the troubling relationship between the public perception of celebrated figures and the true story that lies beneath. Her sixth novel, You Said It is based on fact and results in a convincing portrait of a young couple, their all-consuming love for one another, their struggles as poets, their creative bond and their neuroses.A vast amount has been written about Plath, while far less has been published on Hughes. Beyond literary circles he is often reduced to the role of ‘the husband’. He maintained his self-imposed silence about Plath’s suicide until shortly before his death in 1998 with the publication of Birthday Letters. Palmen’s novel is set around that time and seeks to bring Hughes out of the shadow cast by his wife’s death, perhaps even to emancipate him. The name Sylvia rarely appears in You Said It; Hughes as narrator consistently refers to her as ‘my bride’. The emphasis of the book lies on his work, his poetry, his love for his wife and his powerlessness to help her.

'You Said It' is a novel you cannot put down until the final page has been read. […] it’s like staying up all night listening to the intimate confessions of a close friend and staggering back to your own wan existence, reeling from the intense emotional journey.

The novel’s title echoes the words of Judas at the Last Supper. When Jesus tells his apostles that one of them will betray him and Judas protests ‘Surely, not I Lord?’ Jesus answers ‘You have said so.’ After Plath’s death, many feminists cast Hughes in the role of Judas, as a man who had callously betrayed and abandoned his wife, and many friends shunned him, blaming him for her suicide. In a letter to Plath’s mother, he wrote ‘I don’t want ever to be forgiven’. Palmen succeeds in creating empathy for both husband and wife. Many will feel inclined to take a milder, more forgiving view of Hughes after reading her take on their story.Connie Palmen’s new novel, her first in eight years, is a compelling, lyrical account of love and betrayal.<ul><li>Libris Literature Prize 2016</li></ul>

Connie Palmen’s great achievement in You Said It, a beautifully written book, is that the voice of Ted Hughes wins you over from the word go. You forget that the voice is in fact Palmen’s. That’s when you know the novelist has done her job. Sheer class.

Jij zegt het

After Ted Hughes left her for another woman, Sylvia Plath killed herself. She became a martyr and a saint; he was branded a murderer and a monster. Hughes did little to dispel this version of events. In this novel, written as a dramatic monologue worthy of a poet laureate, Connie Palmen gives Hughes a voice to tell his side of the story.

You Said It

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