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Loading... Man in de verte (1998)by Otto de Kat
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"Cambridge, Budapest, New York, Zurich, The Hague, Tel Aviv, the South Downs of England- the narrator has travelled everywhere. He has observed some of the major upheavals of the century - the Six Day War, the Prague Spring - and collected friends, lovers, and passions every step of the way. As he ages, the memories of his past grow sharper, the events of his childhood more vivid - so vivid, in fact, that his present life recedes into oblivion. He inhabits a world of ghosts and shadows and absence. Throughout his perambulationsa of time and space, one absence always looms largest- that of his father. The figure of his dead father materialises again and again, drawing the narrator back into the past, reviving the people and places of long ago. The Figure in the Distance is a hyptnotic novel, told with a cinematic cross-cutting that suspends the reader in the cobwebs of memory and longing that haunt the narrator." No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)839.3137Literature German literature and literatures of related languages Other Germanic literatures Netherlandish literatures Dutch Dutch fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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De Kat’s book reads like psychological train-of-thought where, among other things the narrator reveals "an almost imperceptible desire to cling to his father." He gradually realized that "his desire to become lost in somebody else was becoming relentless; a form of immaturity . . . nothing the narrator believed in suited him." This book is not a cheerful book. When de Kat touches on religion, I could see that he does not believe. The narrator states that: "Religion tries to lull us to sleep, science tries to keep us awake and art has gone completely off the rails." To the narrator, prayers were like "empty incantations of a rainmaker. They were nothing but words reaching into the dark: 'Father, I am here, where are you?'
I felt sorry for the narrator’s sadness and emptiness, with his "relentless drive to become lost in somebody else like a wounded soul who longs for immortality, his longing for union with his departed father, for somebody to cling to like coral to a reef, who felt nothing he believed suited him." He remembered how upset his father became "over the idea that the rich young man who had been so keen to follow Jesus should have been sent away, sorrowful, told to sell everything he possessed." I think that helped pushed the narrator deeper into depression. Actually, the rich young man was told to sell what he possessed and then come with Jesus.
I wonder, if the narrator knew what Jesus had really said to the young man,--would the narrator have been willing to leave his terrible emptiness and follow Jesus? ( )