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Loading... Netherland (edition 2009)by Joseph O'Neill
Work detailsNetherland by Joseph O'Neill (Author)
After all the hype, this was disappointing. Cricket scenes were the best, but otherwise it wasa unclear (and mostly uninteresting) where characters and story were going. (  ) lxydis | May 11, 2013 |  Hans van den Broek is a top-earning financial guru who, untethered from life by the events of 9/11 and the defection of his wife (and son), finds his own guru in criminal/entrepreneur Chuck Ramkissoon. Hans is emotionally adrift in New York City, and finds his anchor in a cricket league, where he meets Chuck. Chuck imparts a joie de vivre, and a sense of history, of connectedness, using cricket as a metaphor, explaining to Hans that cricket was the original American sport of choice, before it was displaced by baseball. Hans is enlisted in Chuck's "Field of Dreams" project: to create a classic cricket field which, Chuck believes, will restore the proper place of cricket in the American soul. Hans learns that life must be responded to on the fly, just as a cricket batter must learn to respond to the unpredictable rolls and bounces of a cricket ball. The story isn't told in a linear fashion, but skips around in time. This is done for a reason, as some events take on their full meaning only in retrospect. I appreciate how O'Neill, like Hemingway, can often express things effectively by what is not said, rather than by what is said. (  ) EricKibler | Apr 6, 2013 | So beautifully written that the fact that there is no plot to speak of isn't a drawback at all. Quiet, powerful, insightful. ( ) JennyArch | Apr 3, 2013 | I'm not mad at this book; it's just that I don't feel like it caused my brain to go in any new directions. It felt like the author really liked this idea of West Indian and Asian immigrants who get together to play cricket in NYC, so he sort of wrote a novel around it. I probably wouldn't have finished it if I hadn't been stuck in a doctor's office with nothing else to read except a two-year-old copy of Game Informer, but since I did, I don't think it was a complete waste of time. It was very well-written and if you like books about Dutch stock analysts whose marriages are in crisis, you might like this one. ( ) JenneB | Apr 2, 2013 | Along with the NYT, I counted this as one of my own best reads of 2008--which was, by the way, a complete surprise, since the blurb struck me as wholly unexciting and almost pretentious. However, the book was a thorough delight: gorgeous, tragic, full of a lasting emotional resonance. ( ) aliceunderskies | Apr 1, 2013 |
  ...the narrative is unwieldily organised, the supporting characters are underdeveloped and the dialogue is often pretty bad.... The biggest problem, though, is Hans himself. In addition to being much less interesting than Chuck, he tells the story in a determinedly overambitious style.... O'Neill's take on the notion of the American dream is both unsentimental and cleverly attuned to that notion's grip on the local imagination. Perhaps stories of striving immigrants and America's ambiguous promise speak to New York reviewers on frequencies inaudible to outsiders. O'Neill has said that he wrote the book as "an American novel ... My first novel as an American novelist", and in this respect, he seems to have succeeded. Netherland has been described variously as a "post-colonial" and a "Great American" novel. But this beguilingly subtle work transcends old geographical, political and temporal confinements as it renders the strange mutations, partial visions and bewilderments of our globalised world. Despite cricket’s seeming irrelevance to America, the game makes his exquisitely written novel “Netherland” a large fictional achievement, and one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read. ...the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell. On a micro level, it’s about a couple and their young son living in Lower Manhattan when the planes hit, and about the event’s rippling emotional aftermath in their lives. On a macro level, it’s about nearly everything: family, politics, identity. I devoured it in three thirsty gulps, gulps that satisfied a craving I didn’t know I had.
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Wikipedia in English (4)
Question: President Obama mentioned in a New York Times Magazine profile that he’s reading Netherland. How do you feel about the President reading your book?
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