Margriet de Moor
Margriet de Moor
Margriet de Moor (b. 1941) is one of Holland’s most prominent writers. She started her writing career in 1988 with a collection of stories, 'Op de rug gezien' (Seen From Behind). A year later, 'Dubbelportret' (Double Portrait) appeared, three novellas in one volume.
De Moor’s highly praised first novel, Eerst grijs dan wit dan blauw (First Grey, Then White, Then Blue, 1990) won her the AKO Literature Prize. Three years later, De virtuoos (The Virtuoso, 1993) was also nominated for this prestigious award. She has since published novels such as Hertog van Egypte (Duke of Egypt, 1996), Kreuzersonate (The Kreutzersonata, 2001), De verdronkene (Drowned, 2005), De kegelwerper (The Juggler, 2006). De schilder en het meisje (The Painter and the Girl, 2010) and Mélodie d’amour (2013). Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
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Margriet de Moor
The Painter and the Girl
Margriet de Moor has the rare ability as a writer to touch upon the enigma of our existence, even to make known the unknowable within the ‘bewilderingly ambiguous domain of facts and words’, as she called it in Ik droom dus, her collection of short stories. De Moor does so not by relating realistic or straightforward tales, but through the roundabout route of imaginary lives, sensitively following the intuition of her characters.
Margriet de Moor
The Kreutzer Sonata
De Moor has built her latest novel around the Kreutzersonate by the Czech composer, Leos Janácek, who, in turn, based his string quartet on the novel of the same name by Leo Tolstoy. In Tolstoy’s story, a man and a woman are playing the sonata Ludwig van Beethoven composed for the French violinist and composer, Rudolphe Kreutzer. The two fall in love as they play, which poisons the husband’s mind with jealousy, so that he kills his wife.