Everything for the Trip
A poetic novel about a secret romance that lasted nearly forty years
For almost forty years, Adriaan van Dis kept the love of his life a secret. Now, following her death, he revives her in this poetic novel about an extraordinary three-way relationship. They meet in the 80s on the set of a TV and literature programme – she, Eefje, is the director; he is the presenter. They fall in love, but Eefje stays with ‘the Other’, with a capital O, as the narrator insists on calling him.
When Eefje is diagnosed with a terminal illness, she signs herself into a hospice to receive the care she needs – and have a place to host her admirer. They undertake their last journey together, back in time: to their trips around the world, to their traumatic youths, to their early romances. Told in great detail, for the first time, as death awaits. The conversations reveal why they – two people who had to grieve too soon, who grew up in broken homes and who shrouded themselves in a persistent air of mystery – were always meant for each other.
Everything for the trip bundles romance, grief and self-portrait into one. Van Dis’s choppy style and brief, fragmented chapters offer an accurate portrayal of the end of life. He writes about the beauty of a romance kept alive by its limitations – never stagnant, forever a work in progress. At the same time, he shows the systematic erasing of Eefje as a woman and director and how the men she managed rose to fame rather than her.
Themes: unconventional love, mourning, literature and poetry, sexual fluidity, the invisibility of female artists
75.000 copies sold so far
#1 bestseller upon publication
An instant topic of conversation in all major Dutch media outlets
Adriaan van Dis (1946) is the author of an extensive and highly acclaimed literary oeuvre that has been translated into 18 languages and honoured with numerous awards and nominations. .