Maxim Februari

In a dormitory-village in the Dutch countryside, an exclusive book-club is pressured into reading a new novel by a young woman who grew up amongst them. And, naturally, old wounds are reopened, and the members of the club — mostly lawyers and top civil servants — find themselves confronted with the moral consequences of their own actions.

It's a fun idea to shake the book-club out of its normal role as passive consumer of literature, and Februari gets some mileage out of the moral ambiguities of liberal western society in the early 21st century, but this otherwise struck me as an oddly tentative book, that keeps stepping back on the brink of going deeply into any of the main characters. An enjoyable, but slightly odd, mix of moral critique and superficial society novel.… (more)

As of late, the author prefers and uses 'Max' or 'Maximiliaan' while his official last name is Drenth. Previous work listed and was published under a multitude of pseudonyms, which could be categorized into two groups of each three names. The initial "M" which sometimes refers to the female side of the author, as Marjolein Drenth or M. Februari and M. Drenth von Februar, and recently the male side of the author, Max.

The same ambivalence is found in Een pruik van paardenhaar & Over het lezen van een boek. Amartya Sen en de onmogelijkheid van de Paretiaanse liberaal which is neither purely a novel nor exclusively as a thesis, although it did fulfill this role as a PhD thesis. The title suggests a dual publication under dual authorship, while in fact, it is a single work under two pseudonyms which refer to a single author.

An earlier novel, De zonen van het uitzicht (1989) was anaemic and bland, but hailed as promising. This was followed by Een pruik van paardenhaar & Over het lezen van een boek. Amartya Sen en de onmogelijkheid van de Paretiaanse liberaal more than a decade later, in 2000. Presenting the work as literary or consisting of both literary and scientific passages is somewhat deluding. The work is a highly cerebral, theoretical and philosophical work on ethics.

Not for ordinary readers, extraordinary, perhaps.… (more)

Heerlijk associatief geschreven.

Onconventioneel om alles wat in je opkomt, als in het schrijven van een brief als adolescent aan een geestverwant, in de tekst te zetten.

Blijkt bij navraag natuurlijk dat het allemaal overdacht gecomponeerd is; net als de opbouw van radiouitzending van vee-pee-ree-oos Ron-flon-flon op woensdagmiddag destijds.

Ondertussen zijn er twee verhaallijnen vervlochten. Twee? Niet bij te houden hoeveel; En dan mis ik nog kennis van Filosofie en Recht om alles te begrijpen, twee keer lezen kan geen kwaad.… (more)