Arrowhead
A moving and inventive debut novel about the search for missing origins
The anonymous first-person narrator in Teddy Tops’s debut novel is the sole survivor of a car crash that kills her parents, leaving her – just four years old – with only a handful of memories that she can’t be sure are true. Each time she replays them in her mind, they appear in a different setting or feature different cast members. How can she know where she really comes from?
In an attempt to give some coherence to her identity, she begins to rewrite the lives of her grandmothers Levi and Jo. What if they had met each other instead of their spouses? What if they had been free to live their lives as they wished?
Grandma Levi bears her own unbearable loss: one of a ten-year-old Jewish girl who, one morning, arrived at her school to find the yard deserted. She spent the war living with anyone who would give her a place to hide. After liberation, she regularly returned to the bridge where she had last seen her mother. Maybe, just maybe, she’d find her there.
Compelling in its quiet intensity, Tops’s novel consists of two parts – Aboveground and Underground – in which time becomes fluid and the boundaries between memory, figment of imagination and longing blur. The novel’s seven chapters take us through each passing minute of the car accident: as the first-person narrator and her parents sink deeper, we experience moments of extraordinary silence and concentration.
A debut that is rare in its literary maturity and highly acclaimed by the Dutch press
Themes: intergenerational trauma, Jewish experience of WWII, mourning, female identity, the unreliable narrator
160 pages — dense, poetic and exceptionally ripe for multiple readings
Teddy Tops (Utrecht, 1988) is a radio presenter, interviewer, writer and programme writer. She is also the director of the international spoken word platform Mensen Zeggen Dingen.