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He made his debut in 2006 with the novella Lipari, which earned him the Selexyz Debut Prize. Het verdwijnen van Robbert (The Disappearance of Robbert, 2013) was shortlisted for the Libris Literature Prize and the BNG Literature Prize. Antoinette (2019) also received much critical acclaim and is to be published in Japanese with Shueisha and in Spanish with Portaculturas. 2021 saw the publication of his latest novel, Window, Key, which earned rave reviews and went into its fifth print run after just a few months.

Robbert Welagen

It takes Lastrucci a great deal of effort to rediscover himself, but in the house where he was born a peaceful sensation comes over him. With instinctive haste he decides to buy the house, despite its neglected state. Porta Romana is a classic story of the search for identity, a subject Welagen has touched upon before. Most striking, however, is his clear, perfectly composed way of telling a story. There is not so much as an echo of the pace and character of today’s world. In fact it rather seems as if Welagen has modelled Lastrucci’s story on images from old films: ‘A bag blew against his leg and then tumbled on over the paving stones.’The atmosphere is reminiscent at times of the masterworks of 1970s Italian and French cinematography. It has a grainy restraint, while also being sexy in its own remarkable way. In any attempt to describe Welagen’s novel further, the term ‘retro’ becomes unavoidable as a way of making clear that we are dealing not with old-fashioned prose but with work in which the author purposefully makes use of images and styles from another period and discipline.Welagen performed the same feat in his earlier novels. There it was contemporary art that inspired him to create his muted images and it has been said he ‘writes like a painter’. Porta Romana demonstrates the same unusual way of working, manifesting artistic richness and great expressive power.

An unfashionable but impressive novel.

Robbert Welagen manages to make the loneliness of his Emilio Lastrucci understandable in a very restrained and controlled way.

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Porta romana

Fifty-plus and single, Emilio Lastrucci wakes up in hospital with severe memory loss. What has happened? He has only vague memories of the past. Who can tell him more about himself? His character’s quest leads from Vevey in Switzerland to Rome and Florence and takes him from hotels and lodgings to old houses, friends and one close relative. He also meets an old flame, a woman he lived with for three years. ‘Look at me,’ she whispers. ‘Can’t you see who I am?’

Porta Romana

Karlijn has just published her debut novel when a journalist named Hanna comes to visit with a camera crew in tow. Karlijn walks them out afterwards, but remembers too late that she has left a window open and there’s a through draft: she watches the door slam shut right in front of her. She uses her neighbour’s phone to call her boyfriend Arne, a teacher who has just finished work for the day. They agree to meet halfway so he can give her his key, and he gets on his bicycle. She sets off walking to meet him, until she notices that an accident has taken place.Window, Key is about the confusion that floods Karlijn in the months after Arne’s death. She feels guilty about her boyfriend’s death – all the more so when she realises that the door would never have slammed shut in the first place if she hadn’t felt so attracted to the journalist who suggestively placed a hand on Karlijn’s knee after their conversation. If she hadn’t engaged in this flirtation that got her so hot and bothered she had to open the window, Arne might still be alive. But she keeps on engaging, again and again, and she and Hanna become lovers.As a writer, Welagen is all about silence and small gestures, as we can see in Karlijn’s obsession with erasing the past. She rubs out every word in the little notebook she previously filled up while working on her novel – and when she finds passages in other books that Hanna has underlined that remind Karlijn a little too much of their own situation, she erases those pencil marks too. Window, Key is a stunning novel about the unfamiliar within ourselves, about love, grief and starting over, and about how literature can be a kind of magic balm.

This mesmerising book is the work of a writer at the peak of his powers.

With his restrained, perfectly calibrated novel, Welagen shows that the question of whether men are able to write about the love between women is a superfluous one.

Raam, sleutel

For a female author, life as she has known it comes to an abrupt halt one day when she meets another woman she’s instantly drawn to, but then also loses her boyfriend in an accident for which she blames herself. A novel about attraction and guilt, about grief, life and literature.

Window, Key

The 42-year-old Robbert is ‘halfway through his life in a dark cellar’ and finds himself waiting for his wife Antoinette in a thermal bath in Budapest. Will she show up? Robbert calmly explains in great detail how they met, how they ended up living together, how they decorated their house and how they planned to start a family. He tells how he and Antoinette dreamt of having a simple, perfect life with children - ’a girl with a tiara in her hair, a boy reading a comic book’ - and how one day the love of his life left him.For reasons that remain unclear, Antoinette is unable to get pregnant. The couple undergoes fertility tests, hormone treatments and hospital visits. The labs, the waiting rooms, the jars, the sex by appointment - it is extraordinarily refreshing to read a man’s perspective on everything a couple has to go through before their childless fate must ultimately be accepted.Slowly Robbert feels his wife drifting away. The two lovers start blaming each other for everything. If he puts his love for her over his desire to have children, for example, does that mean he doesn’t care about her happiness? Antoinette wants them to suffer together and resist fate; Robbert doesn’t want his life and marriage to be hijacked. About every man he sees, Robbert wonders: ‘Can you tell by looking at a man whether he’s a father? By a look, a gesture or something else?’ The melancholy for that which he did not become - a father - is just as strong as the melancholy for lost love.Involuntary childlessness has rarely been expressed as beautifully and empathically as by Robbert, waiting for Antoinette in the steaming baths of Budapest.

It is precisely because he manages to make the friction between the lovers visible, even in the smallest interactions, because he portrays grief unfiltered, that this novel can rightly be called heartbreaking.

Thanks to Welagen’s refined, light-romantic style, this ‘little’ drama resonates with a greater, more universal desire—for another time, another place, another life.

Antoinette

The relationship between a man and a woman changes dramatically when their deepest desire to have a child is not fulfilled. This is the drama in Robbert Welagen’s eighth novel. In the languid, summery, nostalgic atmosphere that has become the trademark of his work, a moving love story unfolds.

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Porta Romana

Window, Key

Antoinette