The love and stories form the only richness of a family that keeps getting poorer. Because the living room of the new house is as long as nine open arms, the sisters baptize it ‘nine open arms’. It sounds like a hug but soon it is obvious that that the house offers so little protection against all kinds of disaster that reality cannot be embellished by dreams and stories.

The book consists of three parts, each with its own tone and rhythm. The first part is a detailed story about the relationships between the members of the family and the grim circumstances in which they survive. The book regularly moves ahead of the actual events. Because of this, fragments of stories come up which later turn out to be part of a bigger context.

Part two is about the tragic love history belonging to the house. It has the cadence and tension build-up of an oral story. In part three, a regular shifting to a higher or lower gear accentuates the entanglement of the different histories and of the present and the past. Grandmother had always determined which stories where to be heard.

After a conflict with her granddaughter she exposes which ones were silenced and which ones were lies. By continually making ever-smaller nuances, Lindelauf shows how relative the truth is and how vulnerable the person who does or does not rely on it blindly.

The whole story is larded with words and expressions in dialect because not only your territory but also your language is a validation of who you are and where you belong. Just like stories do: ‘Much can be told about a person’s life. Everybody’s story is attached to other people’s stories through tiny threads’.

Marita Vermeulen