mooie melancholie! ( )

Sixty-something composer Pierre is heading down the autoroute to Avignon with the severely-handicapped teenager Sonny, whom he's abducted from the care-home where he lives. His quixotic mission seems to be to mark Sonny's 16th birthday by taking him to the top of a hill in Provence to tell him the story of his origins, tied up with the location and with the unhappy love-story of Pierre and Sonny's mother.

There's no real evidence that Sonny is in any way able to understand or respond to what he's being told, so the novella is very much a reflective monologue by Pierre, switching from time to time between first and third person. He takes apart the history of his own dysfunctional private life whilst idolising that of Sonny's mother, and we start to see how the love and empathy that he failed to express properly in earlier relationships is now all being projected, clumsily, onto the surrogate infant Sonny.

An uncomfortable story in lots of ways, but you could call it a kind of Belgian/Provençal Of mice and men, perhaps... ( )

Geweldig geschreven! ( )

Read this book till the end, but if you ask me, what I just read, I do not get past repeating the text on the back cover: a story about an elderly man who obducts a handicapped teenager. And after doing that, he sets off in a looooong monologue.

Purpose of the story, what did the writer want to tell? I have no idea.
Ending? After the monologue stops, the book ends. No real other ending.

Conclusion? No other books by this writer for me. And frankly speaking, for me reading this was wasting time. ( )

Het Boekenweekgeschenk van 2015. Ik was niet echt onder de indruk. Het verhaal deed me wat denken aan Tommy Wieringa (Joe Speedboot) en de stijl van Verhulst is wel erg bloemrijk met veel alliteratie en gezocht mooie beeldspraak. Inhoudelijk een mager gegeven, een oudere man die aan zijn zoon (?) vertelt over de relatie met diens moeder. De zoon is zwaar gehandicapt en wordt door de hoofdpersoon ontvoerd uit het tehuis waar hij verblijft. Ze rijden naar Frankrijk en Pierre vertelt zijn verhaal terwijl Sonny zwijgt, een aanval krijgt, in zijn broek poept enz. Tja. ( )