Souvenir utopia : roman

Over a series of short trips, narrator Jean and his friends Frans and Willem, all born in the Netherlands in 1946, travel down the Danube from Donaueschingen to Budapest in Jean’s camper van, with their bikes loaded in the back, and Claudio Magris’ Danube book as their travel-guide. But this isn’t just a tourist trip: Jean has a hidden agenda, trying to piece together what was going on in his family in Scheveningen around the time of the Hungarian Uprising, when he was ten years old. And how this all relates to his mysterious doctor-uncle Ahrend S., who was said to have been “wrong” in the war.

The novel uses this set-up to reflect on the way Dutch people who had been too close to the Nazis were treated after the war during show more the period of “Bijzondere Rechtspleging” (special justice), and the traumas that this process passed on to their children.

This had some nice things in it, but ultimately it reads too much like what it is, a first novel by an experienced travel writer. The observation is spot on, but the development of plot and characters is all over the place, and there are far too many ideas tossed in that never get developed at all. show less