Saskia Noort

READ IN DUTCH

Saskia Noort is een van dé thrillerschrijfsters van Nederland. Toen ik de Eetclub (inmiddels ook verfilmd) als luisterboek tegenkwam, ben ik het maar gaan lezen, onder mijn motto om zoveel mogelijk verschillende schrijvers te lezen (en zo natuurlijk goede schrijvers hoop te ontdekken).

Ik vond dit boek een beetje zoals alle Nederlandse literaire thrillers. Ik vond het boek voorspelbaar en de personages ook niet echt origineel. De schrijfstijl is dan wel vlot en het leest lekker weg, maar ik zou het toch absoluut geen literatuur durven noemen. Voor mij betekent het predikaat literaire thriller dan ook niet zoveel. De eetclub heeft mij niet aangezet tot meer van Saskia Noort's boeken.… (more)

This is the debut novel by Dutch author Saskia Noort. Maria, back-up singer and parent to two small children in Amsterdam, broke up with her partner, Geert, whose mental issues finally proved too much for her. She also had an abortion, feeling unequal to the task of raising three children and working without support. Immediately afterwards, she begins to receive threatening messages and it's clear she's being stalked. The police can't do anything. The stalker is clever enough to disguise their identity, and the harassment intensifies until Maria is frightened enough to leave Amsterdam. She's also worried that people don't believe her. The letters are destroyed. The things that happen are designed to look as though she was inventing the threats and she has no idea who she can trust.

There is a lot that is promising in this book. Maria is an interesting character; prickly and slow to make friends, but loving to her children. She has a hard time asking for help or trusting those who offer her help. The idea of being stalked, and how doubts are raised about the target's perceptions makes for compulsive reading. However, [Back to the Coast] is too flawed a story to do justice to the ideas behind the plot. The stalker's identity is revealed too obviously, too often and too early to maintain suspense and what begins as a tale based in reality becomes more and more outrageous in the book's final pages. I loved the setting, a part of the Netherlands I have visited and I hope to give Noort another try with a later novel.… (more)

A sinister book.
I loved it, don't get me wrong, but somehow it got to me. A woman author, Susan, is obducted by a man she used to have a relationship with. She's married now, has two small children. The obductor, Ernst, is also married with children, but he has cancer and is dying from it. Susan also has an affair with Thom, who is a news reader. Again, a triangle.
Susan is tortured, raped, humiliated. A small movie of that is sent to the cell phone of Thom. Susan hopes (and fears at the same time) that Thom will take action, when he receives that message / movie. After all that happens, Ernst wants to take Susan with him in his grave, he has it all planned. The grave is dug, and he takes her there. >On the road her hand becomes useless (she has one finger less and it bleeds heavily). It is a tric, that way she tries to get Ernst out of the car. It works and she gets away, hitting him with the car.
When he comes around again, he sees an explosion somewhere over there, down the hill. Susan is not in the car, they meet again at the same spot where she left him. They struggle and eventually she wins. Ernst doesn't die yet. The police, who was alarmed by the explosion, arrests her at first. They had no idea of what had been going on. There was noone that reported her missing....
That was the part that shocked me. Thom, receiving that message on his cell phone, did nothing with it at all. She counted on him to alarm her husband, who would call the police, although he would be furious about her deceipt. But not of that happened. So, you can't count on anybody but yourself was the message that was written all over this novel for me. Her husband was only very mad with her, her lover betrayed her and acted cowardly and her ex hurt her very much. She was the only one who got herself more or less out of the situation, by thinking clearly, trying not to panic. It was so realistic, it could have happened in real life. That made the book even more 'horrible' to me.… (more)