Salman Rushdie about the knife attack he barely survived, philosopher Judith Butler about gender and sexuality, Colm Tóibín’s sequel to Brooklyn, a new Amélie Nothomb and Humo journalist Mark Schaevers with The Lives of Claus: these are the books our literary journalists are most interested in. looking forward to in 2024.
Marnix Verplancke and Dirk LeymanJanuary 7, 2024, 2:26 PM
Non-fiction
Salman Rushdie, Mes. Thoughts after an attempted murder (Pluim, April)
In the summer of 2022, Salman Rushdie fell victim to the fatwa pronounced on him 33 years earlier. A man attacked him with a knife, causing him to lose an eye and the use of a hand. In this book, an ode to the literary imagination, he returns to the attack and the way in which it unexpectedly opened up new possibilities.
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Joshua Livestro, A More Perfect Union (Prometheus, March)
The EU claims to have no past and to be ‘sui generis’, without examples or predecessors, but is that true? Joshua Livestro, former political advisor in London, Brussels and The Hague, delved into the past and discovered that the Union had in a sense been predicted for centuries, just like the moment of the founding of the ECSC in 1951, so soon after that scorching World War II.
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Leslie Jamison, Splinters. A different kind of love story (Nijgh & Van Ditmar, March)
What does it mean to be torn between the sadness of the past love and the joy caused by the new one? This is what Leslie Jamison, who previously wrote about her alcohol addiction in the sometimes raw Withdrawal, asks herself in her new book. About having a child and the breakdown of a marriage, about fear, failure and choosing yourself.
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Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (Ten Have, April)
More than thirty years ago, Judith Butler put the discussion around gender and sexuality on the social map. Since then, this American philosopher has continued to fight for the rights of the LGBTQ+ community. In her first book for a general audience, she examines how gender, together with migration and critical race theory, has become the target of the extreme right.
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Hannah Durkin, The Survivors of the Clotilda (Querido, April)
What happened to the last shipload of enslaved Nigerians that arrived in the US in 1860 and were then sold in Alabama? Hannah Durkin followed the fate of these people, how they fought in the Civil War and founded the first all-black city Africatown, and how their descendants committed themselves to the civil rights movement in Selma.
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Wolfgang Struck, Flessenpost (Thomas Rap, April)
In the summer of 2018, someone found a bottle with a note inside on an Australian beach. She turned out to be 132 years old and part of a German experiment that started in 1864 and involved throwing thousands of bottles from ships into the oceans over 69 years. The goal: to map the global ocean currents that are currently under pressure from climate change.
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Peter Pomerantsev, How to win a propaganda war (Unieboek/Het Spectrum, April)
In Nothing is True and Everything is Possible (2014), Peter Pomerantsev, born in Kiev and raised in England, showed how spin and lies had prevailed in Putin’s Russia. In this book he digs deeper into Russian propaganda and links it to the German propaganda of WWII. What do you do about it, he asks, and can you ultimately win a propaganda war?
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Chantal Akerman, My mother laughs (Koppernik, March)
Two years ago, the British Film Institute voted Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Chantal Akerman as the best film of all time. In My Mother Laughs, the filmmaker, known for her feminist avant-garde, describes how she returned from New York to Brussels in 2013 to care for her mother, a journey that brought back a forgotten past.
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Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism (De Arbeiderspress, May)
The idea that the free market economy is not governed is wrong, claims Grace Blakeley. It is just as much a planned economy, except that the plans are not made by politicians, but by the large companies, which then receive the support of politicians. In Vulture Capitalism she surveys a century of corporate crime and political manipulation.
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Kris Lauwerys, From light to darkness (Athenaeum, March)
Freud, Mahler and Klimt spontaneously come to mind when we think of Vienna in the first decades of the 20th century. Kris Lauwerys, on the other hand, focuses on three women who experienced the rise and fall of Viennese culture up close: fashion designer Emilie Flöge, journalist Milena Jesenská and writer Veza Canetti.
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Literature
Alessandro Baricco, Abel (De Bezige Bij, May)
Sheriff Abel became legendary at the age of 27 when he foiled a robbery by firing two pistols at different targets at the same time. And now he is in love with the mysterious Hallelujah Wood. But the fact that she sometimes secretly takes the harp path worries him. Because his mother did the same. Alessandro Baricco ventures into ‘a spiritual western’.
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Anneleen Van Offel, The voice of Sulina (De Arbeiderspers, May)
After her nuanced debut Here everything is safe (2020), Anneleen Van Offel traveled along the banks of the Danube for The Voice of Sulina, from its source in the Black Forest to its mouth in the Black Sea. This should be ‘a fluid book’ about ‘wandering souls and the soul of wandering’. A self-examination of a woman before she becomes a mother.
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Peter Middendorp, Ada’s side (Prometheus, January)
With You Are Mine, Peter Middendorp wrote perhaps one of the most pressing novels of recent years. In it he let farmer, rapist and murderer Tille have his say. Now his wife can offer resistance. Since the fatal event, Ada has been consumed by the question of whether she was complicit. Could she have prevented it and broken the silence?
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Colm Tóibín, Long Island (De Geus, mei)
The sequel to Brooklyn by Irish star Colm Tóibín has been highly anticipated for some time, but now the time has come. New York, 1970s. Irish Eilis Lacey has lived with her husband, Tony Fiorello, and children in Long Island, close to her in-laws, for twenty years. Until a shocking message drives Eilis back to Ireland, to a world she thought she had long left behind.
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Bart Moeyaert, Another life (De Arbeiderspers, April)
A four-part VRT documentary but also a well-deserved place in the prestigious Privédomein series. Bart Moeyaert provides a glimpse into his intimate life. In Another Life, he sculpts a compelling portrait of his (deceased) mother (after a Paris city trip in 1996) and testifies about his late coming of age, the period after his debut Duet voor false notes.
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Mark Schaevers, The lives of Claus (De Bezige Bij, February)
‘Writer, artist, filmmaker and all-rounder Hugo Claus (1929-2008) did everything he could to help shape the myth of his biography,’ it says. How did Humo journalist Mark Schaevers manage to peel off all the protective layers? ‘He follows his subject closely without interpreting explicitly.’ Schaevers also aims for a ‘swirling cultural history that covers half a century.’
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Paolo Cognetti, Down in the valley (De Bezige Bij, February)
Inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s album Nebraska, Paolo Cognetti remains faithful to his themes and sets in Down in the Valley. What can we expect? ‘A pure story about two brothers who have grown apart’, until Fredo and Luigi meet again in their native village, in his empty old house, after the death of their father. And there they have to face their past.
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Joost de Vries, Higher powers (Prometheus, mid-January)
Deputy editor-in-chief of De Groene Amsterdammer Joost de Vries daringly delves into the turbulent 1930s. The cunning, ambitious civil servant James Welmoed meets budding writer Elizabeth van Elzenburg. Their affair ‘burns through the decades’ and takes place ‘in secret rooms’. We flash from colonial Bandung to London, The Hague and revolutionary Cairo. De Vries aims high.
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Patricia Jozef, Gentlemen (De Geus, April)
After Patricia Jozef delicately took on the art scene in her debut Glorie (2017), she now explores the hidden world of male gigolos in Gentlemen. When Marieke and Vik seek refuge in the countryside with their two daughters, their sex life fizzles out. Marieke tries to satisfy her lust with an escort. Can she then return to her old life?
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Amélie Nothomb, Psychopompos (Tzara, juni)
In her latest release, the Belgian writing pacer unashamedly takes the autobiographical route again. She explores what writing exactly means to her and explains her love for birds. And one thing is related to the other. She delves into her years in Laos and Japan and reveals a traumatic event on a beach in Bangladesh when she was twelve.
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2024-01-07 23:10:59
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