Netherland

I recently read Netherland by Jospeh O’Neill. It is a great read and, at the same time, hard to categorize because it touches so many themes. One review (in New York Times) starts off comparing it to 9/11 novels; in another review it’s described as “an Indian novel” .

It is the story of a banker who moves with his family from London to New York where the couple begin to drift apart. The wife moves back to London leaving him alone to brood over his life. During this time he discovers cricket -the game he played as a child – being played by a bunch of  (mostly) West Indian and South Asian immigrants. He also meets a guy called Chuck Ramkissoon who is described by reviewers as a “Gatsby-like” figure.

The book is simultaneously funny, insightful, informative (unless you know a lot about birds of Trinidad etc), melancholic and overwhelming. Consider the following excerpts:

Even I had heard of Faruk, author of Wandering in the Light and other money-spinning multimedia mumbo jumbo about staving off death and disease by accepting our oneness with the cosmos.

“The Wild West”, Schulz said thoughtfully as he wandered off to absorb the view from atop a nearby boulder. I saw that each of my other companeros had likewise assumed a solitary station on the ridge, so that the four of us stood in a row and squinted into the desert like existentialist gunslingers. It was undoubtedly a moment of reckoning, a rare and altogether golden opportunity for a Milwaukeean or Hollander of conscience to consider certain awesome drifts of history or geology and philosophy, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to feel lessened by the immensity of the undertaking and by the poverty of the associations one brought to bear on the instant, which in my case included recollections, for the first time in years, of Lucky Luke, the cartoon-strip cowboy who often rode among the buttes and drew a pistol faster than his own shadow. It briefly entranced me, that remembered seminal image, on the back cover of all the Lucky Luke books, of the yellow-shirted, white-hatted cowboy plugging a hole in the belly of his dark counterpart. To gun down one’s shadow … The exploit struck me, chewing mutton under the sun, as possessing a tantalizing metaphysical significance; and it isn’t an overstatement, I believe, to say that this train of thought, though of course inconclusive and soon reduced to nothing more than nostalgia for the adventure books of my childhood, offered me sanctuary: for where else, outside of reverie’s holy space, was I to find it? “

Sometimes when you read a book you wonder how much of it derives from the author’s own life experiences.

A few days ago, I was watching Charlie Rose interviewing a german author Bernhard Schlink (writer of The Reader). Schlink said that all novels are autobiographical, for, how can you write about that which you have not experienced.

In the novel Netherland, the narrator Hans has a lot in common with the author. E.g. the narrator grows up in Holland and lives in England before moving to New York city where, at some point, he stays at the Chelsea Hotel. The author’s prior job as a food reviewer and his review of C L R James’ book also make their way into the novel.

Now these are superficial details but it makes you wonder about some of the more personal life experiences – how much are they from the author’s own experiences or the people around him and how comfortable he or the people around him are with what goes into the book to be read by possibly millions of people.