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Loading... Joe Speedboot (2005)by Tommy Wieringa
Work InformationJoe Speedboat by Tommy Wieringa (2005) Top Five Books of 2013 (835) Books Read in 2023 (3,431) Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. A quirky coming-of-age novel set in an archetypically shut-in small community behind the dyke of one of the Great Rivers that cross the middle of the Netherlands. Lomark is a place so obscure that when Rijkswaterstaat finally decide to build a bypass around it, they don't bother to provide the villagers with a connection, and it seems their only way out in future will be over Piet Honing's ferry. The chronicler of Lomark life is Frans, who has lost the use of both legs and one arm in an accident in his mid-teens, and doesn't hesitate to see the worst in those around him. But he does form a bond with another outsider in the village, the boy who insists on being called Joe Speedboat, and with a couple of other slightly less marginal teens. Where Frans is necessarily someone who spends most of his time sitting in his wheelchair and watching, Joe takes life in both hands, committing himself to projects that should be well beyond his skill level, quite apart from being things no sane adult would allow him to do. Wieringa allows himself a bit of Tom Sawyerish bending of realism here to demonstrate how Joe's absolute conviction that he can do something usually permits him to achieve it, even if the results aren't always what he might wish. Joe's Egyptian stepfather Mahfouz ("Papa Africa") is credited with a similar semi-magical ability to complete projects. This isn't exactly an escapist fantasy about adolescence, though. We're always being pulled down to earth by Frans's darkly cynical realism, and we are shown that these kids don't live happily ever after — they suffer the same fate as all the rest of us, and turn into adults who have to deal with the pointlessness, mediocrity and arbitrary pain of real life. Wieringa is very good at what he does, there are a lot of sharp observations of provincial, working-class Dutch culture and some good jokes. But it's a bit hard to say whether there's any more than that. Wow, ik weet niet zeker waarom ik zo lang gewacht heb met het lezen van dit boek. Het past helemaal in mijn straatje, maar ik kon denk ik niet helemaal geloven dat een Nederlandse auteur dit soort werk geloofwaardig zou kunnen doen. Er gebeurt zo lekker veel. Een echte coming-of-age novel met echte helden en toch geen platte personages. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to Publisher SeriesGrote lijsters (2009)
After surviving a coma, 13-year-old Frankie Hermans is left paralyzed, mute, and bound to a wheelchair. He sees his life as hopeless until he meets Joe Speedboat, a new boy in town whose sheer kinetic energy and boundless enthusiasm gives Frankie--and the rest of his sleepy Dutch town--a new lease on life. No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)839.31364Literature German literature and literatures of related languages Other Germanic literatures Netherlandish literatures Dutch Dutch fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Joe Speedboot is one of those modern Dutch classics that makes it onto many a highschooler’s literature list, as did it on mine. Perhaps indicative of the student I was back in highschool, I never read Wieringa’s text though, and everything I knew about the book going into my exams was what I read in online summaries of varying quality. This is not to say I didn’t like reading, but I was a poor planner, and I simply didn’t have enough time left.
However, just reading poor summaries made me regret not having been a better planner, as the story of Joe Speedboot stuck with me.
Now, years later, I finally got around to picking up a copy and took the time to read it. As I knew the story but never read the original text, it was an odd sensation of familiarity, like coming back to a town you have visited years ago, and though much is the same, an equal amount has changed. And perhaps this sensation is fitting for the nature of the book.
Fransje Hermans is already disappointed with life, at least with how life is in a sleepy Dutch town in the nineties of the twentieth century, at thirteen. Although he may not have made the conscious decision that he wants to die, something makes him lay down in that field of tall grass with the knowledge that it will be mowed by large, industrial mowers, and something keeps him from getting up despite the sound of the mower getting ever closer.
In his own words, only one thing makes him turn back to the light after all days in a comatose state, the coming of whom he believes to be a messiah, someone who will alter life for the better, Joe Speedboot.
Joe Speedboot combines classical elements of Dutch literature, (the echo of the second world war, a disillusioned protagonist and a naturalistic setting) with fantastical events ripped straight out of a book for mischievous young boys. What books like those never show, however, is that even mischievous boys don’t stay young forever. In the Dutch nineties of Joe Speedboot, even Peter Pans have to grow up and have to deal with reality. Can a messiah exist in an ever more secularized society?
Besides being touching, exciting, humorous and gritty, in the present day Joe Speedboot is also becoming a testimony to a bygone age. ( )