The Bandager

‘I’m not saying the leg was to blame for everything.’ With this  startling opening sentence, Marente de Moor sets the tone for everything to follow in The Orthotist, her astonishing novel about a young man voicing the despair of a generation growing up in European cities who are seeing their dreams go up in smoke because housing has become unaffordable and impossible to find. Joost has dropped out of music school and finds himself working as an ‘orthotist’: he goes to elderly people’s homes to fit them with compression stockings or other orthotics. He spends his days on his knees before legs ‘tumescent with lymphatic fluid, smooth and hard like a washed-up pebble’.  

The elderly people he works for live in giant houses, while he goes from cat-sitting gig to pull-out sofa, constantly terrified his girlfriend will leave him because of his homelessness. It is a predicament he shares with the rest of his generation – one of his friends is on Tinder every night to conquer a new bed to crash in. Joost solves his problem by secretly moving into a client’s attic and letting his girlfriend believe the homeowner consented to this arrangement. This propulsive storyline takes The Orthotist into mysterious, Gothic territory, reminiscent of Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde.  
 
Meanwhile, De Moor – who has long been considered one of the best and most original authors in the Dutch-speaking world – effortlessly weaves her protagonist’s psychology through the heart of the novel’s social indictment and reflections on the decline of Western culture. The people that the orthotist is trying to keep in one piece all have vast libraries – once they pass away, literature and imagination are at risk. In a world where everything is virtual (‘We hit SAVE all day long, but we don’t hold onto anything’, De Moor writes), where thoughts are no longer recorded, literature itself ends up becoming homeless, too.