Kees van Beijnum
The Forbidden Path (Het verboden pad)
In hooligan hands
This is the story of Philip Soek, social worker, whose first job is in a home for problem children where discipline is maintained through a complicated system of rewards. Because Soek comes from a wealthy family both inmates and his colleagues wary of him and he works flat hour to win their approval.
Soek is the narrator, and he talks drily and laconically about his experiences with the kids. When they go on holiday to a campsite in Brittany, one of the young people dies. Who is responsible? This book delves deeply into the rationalizations made as hands are washed in innocence.
Kees van Beijnum’s ambitious novel gives a razor-sharp and convincing picture of the social care provided to young people who have gone astray. Through his narrator Soek, the author has succeeded in presenting several unsentimental and compelling portraits of the young people and the members of staff without distancing himself from them.
As the novel progresses it becomes clear that Van Beijnum’s choice of the social services as his theme is an accurate and interesting metaphor for social relations at large which are so often – and vainly – held in place through rewards, punishments, and rituals.
The protagonist is not emotionally capable of participating in this world, and the novel presents a harrowing and intriguing depiction of this failure.
Publisher
De Bezige Bij
Van Miereveldstraat 1
NL - 1071 DW Amsterdam
TEL. +31 20 305 98 10
FAX +31 20 305 98 24
E-mail: info@debezigebij.nl
Website: www.debezigebij.nl
Publishing details
Het verboden pad (2004, 451 pp)
Biography
Kees van Beijnum (b. 1954) originally worked as a journalist, but after reporting on a case of murder in Amsterdam-Noord, in Over het IJ (Over the IJ Water, 1991), he opted to become a full-time writer. In the novel Dichter op de Zeedijk (A Poet at the Zeedijk, 1995), his literary ambitions became more serious and later novels such as De ordening (The Archives, 1998) and the successful De oesters van Nam Kee (Oysters at Nam Kee’s, 2000), which received the Bordewijk Award and was made into a successful film, demonstrated his increasing mastery of the profession. Whereas his earlier work was strongly biographically tinted, the later novels have broadened out. Van Beijnum’s work follows the tradition of such great American writers as Capote, Hemingway, and Faulkner. His characters attempt to get a grip on the world, and deliberate on their own participation in it, subtly covering major ethical and social problems in the process. In 2002 Van Beijnum published the novel De vrouw die alles had (The Woman Who Had Everything), followed in 2004 by Het verboden pad (The Forbidden Path) and in 2008 by Paradiso.
Website: www.keesvanbeijnum.nl
Quotes
Van Beijnum sketches a beautiful yet sombre picture of modern youth, without completely giving up hope – that is the virtue of this book.
HP De Tijd
An exciting, raw and, above all, deeply involved novel about realistic problems. A moving, if not very reassuring portrait of an era.
NRC Handelsblad