Review by Booklist Review
Somewhere in the danker areas of the Netherlands, young Sam van Dijk embarks on an odyssey to recapture his past and build his emotional future. In this first-person account, Sam admits he has no memories preceding his parents' suspicious deaths in an auto accident when he was 12. Soon after, he and his twin sister, Lisa, and older brother, Raph, are portioned out to foster homes and reunited years later as adults. Lisa, a bohemian artist, and Raph, a peripatetic photographer, serve as Sam's melancholy mentors in his search for someone to be, someone to love. Ironically, he works as an archivist, organizing others' memories, yet cannot determine his own provenance. Like the elusive girl in polka dots whom he hankers for when she occasionally appears outside his window, the faceless figures of his ancestors become permanent ghosts he must pursue. In his lyrical, literary, slightly erotic second novel, Moring shows us a man's "great longing" for love that is not illusory, for a return to the peace at the origin of his odyssey. A skillfully rendered novel. --Patricia Hassler
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Dutch novelist Möring's first novel to appear stateside, a lyrical, mildly existential tale of memory lost and refound, is set in an urban desert of stylized alienation. Sam van Djik, 30, has lost possession of his past and, accompanied by his twin sister and an eccentric older brother, sets out to find and regroup the scattered pieces. The origin of Sam's amnesia is the car accident that killed his parents in his early youth; as his slightly deranged and hypersensitive mind moves restlessly backward through time, it alights again and again upon images of his childhood, in particular those of his dead father and mother. Sam's trauma leads him into inconsequentiality in adulthood as he drifts aimlessly into the lackluster profession of archivist, living in an abandoned warehouse and trawling through a hip but curiously innocuous underworld. Möring's writing can be supple and momentarily intriguing, but it lacks the intensity or originality to give the meandering, whimsical plot depth-or even surface excitement. Sam seems too casual and even-tempered to have been truly traumatized, and so his memory loss seems more like a literary device than a gripping pathology. The narrative's cute urban-wasteland setting comes off as overdesigned, as well. If he fails to forge a novel of dynamic unpredictability, however, Möring does show that he is capable of more interesting work down the line. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this imaginative novel, Sam van Dijk has lived his life in an amnesiac fog (whether real or self-imposed is unclear). After Sam's parents were killed in a car accident when he was a child, he moved through a series of foster homes. His surroundings became a blur, and the people remained slightly out of focus. As a young adult, Sam is reunited with his brother and twin sister. His brother seems determined to forget the past, but his sister, in stark contrast to Sam, is determined to chronicle it. Sam finds work as an archivist, carefully and tediously piecing together company histories from documents and memorabilia, all the while unable to reconstruct his own history from fragments of memory and snatches of conversations. Part mystery, part existential tract, this novel won the equivalent of the Booker Prize in Moring's native Holland, where the book was a best seller. For serious literature collections.Peggie Partello, Keene State Coll., N.H. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
From Dutch writer Möring, an ambitious search-for-the-meaning- of-life novel that offers lovely moments but suffers from flat- footedness. The three van Dijk children--twins Sam and Lisa, born in 1957, the year of Sputnik, and their slightly older brother Raph--are transformed into orphans one night in 1969 when their parents ``drove into a tree on their way home.'' The children are placed separately into a series of foster homes until they come of age--at which time they seek one another out once more and the novel begins. The story is told mainly by Sam, who not only doesn't know quite what to do with his life but feels that his memory has gone empty and dead--hence his ``great longing,'' however doomed, to recapture what's been lost of childhood, family, and the past. Yearlong wanderings with Raph don't help much, nor do extended talks with sister Lisa, whose own memory is deep and full but who isn't terribly stable, her marriage less so. No rule says much has to happen in a novel, and the trouble here isn't that little does- -outwardly, at least--but only that what does happen is so often inadvertently banal. Möring's descriptions of a ruined, post- industrialist European landscape and cityscape are often powerful, as are his efforts to sweep up lyrical bouquets of half-lost memories. But things that could possibly be of substance deteriorate, again and again, to adolescent posturing in lines like ``I began to understand that the journey...was an attempt to appease the hunger of youth''; or `` `I don't know,' she said. `I don't know if you understand anything about people and human relationships' ''; or ``I know you're in there, I said to the void inside my head.'' Earnest themes of modern loss, but, on balance, more often jejune than moving.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
