Boek

Arnon Grunberg

Moedervlekken

A razor-sharp absurdist novel written by a son for his dying mother

Hannelore Grünberg-Klein, mother of Arnon Grunberg, died on 10th February 2015. She was eighty-seven and a survivor of Auschwitz. Anyone who has followed Grunberg’s career will be conscious of what a blow that must have been. Their relationship was symbiotic. When she died Grunberg wrote, ‘Now I’ll have to live on as my mother.’

Even before his mother became terminally ill, Grunberg announced his intention to move back home for a while. He was to be ‘embedded’ in his mother’s house and write about the experience. A year after her death his major new novel appeared: Birthmarks, a book that in no sense delivers what you would expect.

Birthmarks is about a psychiatrist, Otto Kadoke. He was named after Otto Frank but dislikes the Jewishness of his forename. His surname is pronounced like a mangled ‘okay’, although he is anything but okay. Or might it be kaput? Kadoke’s mission in life is to guard people against death. His elderly mother for a start, for whom he employs a Nepalese home help.

In his job, too, he guards against death since he works for the emergency suicide prevention service. Kadoke’s mission seems doomed to failure, mainly because he totally misjudges the people around him. He falls for the Nepalese home help, for example. When she opens the door of his mother’s house wrapped in a towel, he mistakenly takes it as an invitation to sex.

At the point when he overpowers her, his mother comes into the room and he quarrels with her during the act. ‘You’re worse than the Nazis,’ she says.

The novel soon becomes absurd. On page 72 we abruptly discover that Otto’s mother has ‘a prick’. She is actually his father, who, after his mother’s death began wearing her clothes out of grief and then took over her role. The situation grows increasingly desperate. Kadoke is beaten up by the Nepalese home help’s boyfriend, becomes more psychologically disturbed than his patients and develops birthmarks, benign ‘anxiety spots’.

With his razor-sharp writing, Grunberg makes the reader laugh and cry at the same time. There is, in the end, a glimmer of hope for the tragic and blundering Kadoke, even as he gropes in the dark. Birthmarks is the ultimate attempt by Arnon Grunberg to keep both his mother and himself alive through literature.

What Grunberg describes here is a prohibition on happiness that’s passed on from one generation to the next. He’s not the first to do it and it’s not the first time he’s done it, but he does it extremely incisively.

NRC Handelsblad

Birthmarks is a stylistic tour de force, a breath of fresh air and already one of my favourite Grunbergs.

HUMO

Vertalingen

Arnon Grunberg

Arnon Grunberg (1971) maakte zijn debuut op 23 jarige leeftijd met de roman Blauwe maandagen (1994) waarin hij de wereld van de prostitutie met wrange humor omschrijft. Het boek was meteen een succes. De twee romans die daar op volgden, Figuranten (1997) en Fantoompijn (2000), bevestigden voor…

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Details

Moedervlekken (2016). Fictie, 399 pagina's.
Aantal woorden: 125.000
Oplage: 60.000

English sample available

Uitgeverij

Lebowski

Paul van Vlissingenstraat 18
1096 BK Amsterdam
Nederland
Tel: +31 20 462 43 00

Website:
http://www.lebowskipublishers…

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Literair agent

Arnon Grunberg Agency


E-mail:
[email protected]
Website:
http://www.arnongrunbergagenc…

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