The Great Flood
Fourteen-year-old Moos wakes up to find Leon, his foster grandfather, sailing into his room, complete with his bed. The world has been engulfed by a devastating flood. Fortunately, Moos is prepared: a raft carrying his grandpa’s old Buick and sufficient food and tobacco for Grandpa proves to be a lifesaver, and a frantic adventure ensues, full of social criticism.
Sjoerd Kuyper makes no bones about it. Humans have brought this flood upon themselves by their greed and destructiveness. ‘They saw nothing, heard nothing, or pretended not to,’ he writes, ‘because they didn’t want to hear or see anything. The sun burned more harshly than ever, but they called it nice weather for a barbecue and everyone became richer and everyone thought they were entitled to everything and everyone flew all over the world.’
Kuyper’s vision of the future may be bleak, but his tone is anything but. He refers to the book as ‘a mischievously playful dystopia’. It’s a fair description: right from the opening scene, the jokes race by at the same pace as the bizarre adventures. Meanwhile, Kuyper speaks through the mouth of Grandpa Leon to vent his dissatisfaction with our current era, covering everything from the decline of democracy to the reading crisis to fake news. When Kuyper’s heroes wash ashore on Atlantis (a hypermodern mountain-based dictatorship, as the story about it being a sunken island turns out to be fake news), the refugee crisis comes up too. The heartless admission policy speaks volumes, as do the starving asylum seekers at the gates of Atlantis. But Moos, Grandpa Leon and their friends are irredeemable optimists, trying with all their might to save the world.
Meanwhile, Kuyper’s love of life and all the beauty that is at risk of being lost fills the pages of this book, with beautiful, poetic Kuyper sentences and hope that everything will turn out well, as long as we keep on caring about one another and, above all, believing in the power of stories. In short, this is a book that you need to read.
12+
A thrilling adventure set in the future
Both hilarious and horrifying
Lively and poetic use of language
With an important message
Memorable protagonists
Sjoerd Kuyper (b. 1952) made his writing debut in 1974 with a collection of poems for adults. He wrote various stories for television, among them 'Majesteit, Uw ontbijt' (‘Your Breakfast, Sire’) and 'Het zakmes' (‘The Pocket Knife’) which was also filmed and received fourteen awards, among them an Emmy.