A Heart of Stone

<p>In a striking coming-of-age novel, a young Dutch woman living in suburban Amsterdam re-examines her past to understand why the heartbreak of her twelfth birthday still haunts her. Reprint.</p>

Literature & Fiction

Hester Velmans

renate-dorrestein

Genre Fiction

Penguin??Books

Precocious Ellen is the only one of the four close Van Bemmel children who dreads the arrival of the new baby. She has told her parents to call the baby Ida, the ugliest name she could think of, and is afraid that this curse she has put upon the unborn child will come true. Her parents, eccentric and devoted to each other, seem to the outside world to be loving and caring, but after one of the children has a shocking accident a horror descends upon this happy household which leads to a disaster even Ellen, dubbed by her father 'the cement of the family', is powerless to prevent. Twenty-five years later a pregnant Ellen returns to the family home, where she is haunted by the voices of her dead family. She imagines the questions her own child will one day ask-'Mummy, why don't I have a granny? Why no grandad? No uncles or aunts? Why not?' A Heart of Stone is an elegant, memorable novel, warmed by a passionate affection for all its characters, full of laughter and love despite the tragedy at its centre.

Contemporary

DOUBLEDAY

Without Mercy

Ted Smart

Crying Shame

Black Swan.

A Heart of Stone is the first novel by best-selling Dutch author, Renate Dorrestein, to appear in English (admirably translated by Hester Velmans). It's an extraordinary, and compelling, story of family and violence, childhood and madness--a story whose deft changes of perspective support the suspense that runs right through to the novel's conclusion. From the narrator, Ellen, the third of five children, we know that something has gone terribly wrong for the Van Bemmel family. What, why, and how is only gradually discovered through Dorrestein's powerful exploration of a family apparently doomed to destruction. In her late thirties, Ellen's own pregnancy is the catalyst for her journey of remembrance, her recovery of her parents' wish to give their children "a blessedly happy and carefree childhood" and the perversity that can accompany a mother's faith in the fact that she knows what is best for her children. A story of memory, mourning and rebirth, A Heart of Stone keys in to some of the most painful themes in contemporary fiction. Far from incidental, or gratuitous, that pain is integrated into Dorrestein's exploration of how a fiction might respond to a child's question--"What happens to dead people?"--posed in the most extreme circumstances. "The police discovered Carlos and me huddled in the darkest corner of Billie's old cellar, sobbing with fright"': one of the first indications of what has happened appears early in this novel that, like its narrator, swerves away from finding, and telling, more--at least until the very end of the book when, with tact and care, Dorrestein forces her character (and readers) up against what she has tried so hard not to know.

Frank and Phinus have been happily married for fourteen years when a senseless act loses them their only child, their teenage son Jem. From then on they are immersed in a nightmare from which there seems to be no escape. Phinus loses her ability to sleep, and the formerly gentle Frank tries to combat his grief and guilt with obsessive vengefulness which escalates out of control. A weekend visit to a country house hotel is supposed to bring the couple back together, but it erups into a series of escalating bizarre, hilarious confrontations which only emphasizes their estrangement. Dorrestein's novels are always based on a topical social issue familiar from newspaper headlines, which make them provocative and contemporary: In Without Mercy, it is a teenage shooting with echoes of American high school massacres like that at Columbine High in Denver two years ago. This heartbreaking, yet strangely funny, thought-provoking and compelling novel about guilt and grief is by a mistress of suspense who shows us all that hell is not other people as is generally supposed: that there is nothing as terrible as what a person can do to himself.

Transworld Pub

Herz aus Stein: Roman

Bertelsmann

Een hart van steen

Contact

ZONDER GENADE (PBK)

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