Martin Michael Driessen

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From award-winning Dutch author Martin Michael Driessen comes a fearlessly funny tragedy about an improbable friendship, unstable dreams, missed opportunities, and epic coincidence.

In a quiet coastal town in Yugoslavia, two men seeking more than the Communist regime can offer find their lives deceitfully entwined.

Andrej is a postman in complete denial of his existence. He yearns for respect and fame but commits petty crimes for reasons he doesn’t show more fully comprehend. Josip is an increasingly irrelevant cable car operator and unfaithfully married. Life was so much simpler when neither one knew the other’s secrets. Now that they do—discovered quite by accident—each man has resorted to blackmailing the other. As their anonymous misdeeds escalate, a farce of mutual dependency begins. So does the unlikeliest of friendships when Andrej and Josip finally meet face-to-face.

In a tale set against the impending wars, Martin Michael Driessen ingeniously explores the foibles of two painfully ordinary men boldly staking their claims on life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: This *is* a comedy, albeit a really dark one, despite the synopsis and the actual content matching perfectly. The strangeness of two old friends unknowingly blackmailing each other for unsuspected peccadillos that neither knows the other is the one committing...we're well into absurdist territory. Set just before the Yugoslav civil wars that ended the artificially created country as an entity amid atrocities and abomination, it might be just a bit on-the-nose.

I enjoyed the story as a story. When I could ignore the geopolitical resonances of a book written in the teens about events a quarter century gone, I was okay. It really *is* funny. It's only the overlay of my post-2020 knowledge base that made me squirm. The way Andrej and Josip could simply...not know...each other was deeply sad. It's kind of the point, of course, how well do we know each other? Yet the ending point of the story was very very dark indeed.

Don't think too much about the title. It does eventually make sense.

Amazon Crossing says "$4.99 please" for a purchase, or "free" if you pay them for Kindle Unlimited. show less

Translated from Dutch, this book consists of 3 long short stories. It also won the 2016 ECI Literature Prize (which I admit I have never heard of).

These stories are so well written and so interesting. Each of the main characters is so attached to his/her river--whether it is their livelihood or vital to their idea of home, the different rivers are key. Driessen manages to capture how vital these rivers are to his characters' lives and senses of self, and how they actually love their show more river.

The stories:
Fleuve Sauvage: All Comes to Naught. A drunk canoes down the river in the canoe he bought for his son, who wants nothing to do with him

Voyage to The Moon: Life is a Dream. Follows the life of one of the last generation of men to raft logs down the Rodach, Main, and Rhine; and his friend Julius, who inherits his father's logging business (of different classes, they cannot truly be friends). We meet Konrad the first season he gets to stay on shore and work the logs, through the year he first gets to raft, to middle-aged Konrad seeing the end of rafting as Hitler comes to power.

Pierre and Adele: He Shall Be Purified by Fire, Water, Air, and Earth. Two families share a valley, each on one side of a creek. They have been fighting over the creek's movement for at least 100 years--making multiple generations of lawyers wealthy. Pierre and Adele, and Eduard their lawyer, are the last of the generations who seem to have solved the problem. show less

Three interesting short stories, each around a river, river as leitmotif one could say. The river as overwhelming force, the river as highway to the world and the river as boundary. Each story is interesting in itself and stands alone. But as a collection, they come into their own. 2 August 2018.

"Konrad bleef nog lang zitten, alsof hij erop wachtte dat de leemte die de ander had achtergelaten als vanzelf weer opgevuld zou worden, zoals het murmelen van de Rodach terugkwam nadat de achteloos wisselende wind het een tijdlang had ontvoerd, zoals de sterren boven hem zich weer vertoonden als er een wolk voorbijgegaan was" (63).