Adriaan van Dis
The Walker (De wandelaar)
A powerful novel with a social conscience
Mr Mulder seems to all appearances to be a upstanding gentleman, gliding through life, impeccably dressed, aloof to the hustle and bustle of the world around him. Because of a sizeable inheritance he can afford to idle away his time, and so he leaves Holland for Paris, where he leads an anonymous, solitary existence. One night he witnesses a dramatic fire in a building occupied by illegal immigrants and transients. People throw themselves out of windows in blind panic, as the crowd below looks on helplessly.
From that day on Mulder finds himself with a new pet: a dog which survived the fire has adopted him. Mulder tries to shake him off, but the dog follows him everywhere. The dog seems to mirror the suppressed, instinctive side of Mulder’s personality: everything the man shies away from, the dog seeks out. The animal also has an infallible memory for the people he knew before, and he opens up a new world for Mulder.
In searching for the cause of the fire, Mulder encounters a motley group of characters, like the whisky-soaked priest Bruno, a onelegged beggar woman and a taciturn Chinese who is never without his pull-cart. Mulder also starts to develop warm feelings for Sri, a mysterious woman he wants to save from the life of an illegal immigrant with a fake passport. But she is less than thrilled by his offers of help. ‘I want to live my life without feeling guilty,’ she says. ‘Me too,’ he replies. ‘That’s why I want to help you.’ But all Mulder’s attempts to do the right thing come to naught.
He is a believer without a god, a man committed to the idea of ‘doing a little good’. But his ideals are no match for a city teeming with unrest and racial hatred, where riots in the banlieus are an ever-present threat to society. De wandelaar (The Walker) is a powerful, socially aware novel as well as an emotionally involving story of a loner who tries to give his life meaning in an ever more extreme world.
Publisher
Augustus
Herengracht 481
NL - 1017 BT Amsterdam
TEL. +31 20 524 98 00
FAX +31 20 627 68 51
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.augustus.nl
Publishing details
De wandelaar (2007, 224 pp)
Biography
Adriaan van Dis, born in 1946 in Bergen, the Netherlands, made his debut with the novella Nathan Sid, the story of a boy growing up between two cultures: the paradise of colonial Indonesia and the drabness of the Netherlands after the Second World War. Van Dis is interested in cultural clashes, and this fascination permeates his entire oeuvre, from Nathan Sid to his most successful novel, Indische duinen (My Father’s War, 1994). A confrontation between two different cultures is also more than apparent in his travel books, such as In Africa (1991), which deals with the war in Mozambique. In his novel Familieziek (Repatriated, 2002) Van Dis recounts the humorous and moving story of a boy who grows up in a family repatriated to the Netherlands from Indonesia, and who remains an outsider despite his endearing attempts to integrate. De wandelaar (The Walker, 2007) is his last novel to date. Van Dis currently lives in Paris.
Dossier
Quotes
Adriaan van Dis is a master of self-effacement, and ironizes in a subtle manner the yearning to ‘do something’ about the suffering in the world. He has succeeded in writing a novel that rubs the reader’s nose in today’s news.
NRC Handelsblad
De wandelaar is a witness to powerlessness and anger, and yet also of empathy with the tormented metropolitan society in the Western world. algemeen dagblad A topical novel that poses urgent questions. The unity of time and place ensures that the narrative remains compact, while the pace and fluent style do the rest.
Elsevier
The fact that De wandelaar emerges as an invigorating reading experience is due to the deft style that is Van Dis’s trade mark. Smooth sentences, elegant and acute phrasing, apt characterization, it’s all there.
Brabants Dagblad
Translations
- Ein feiner Herr und ein armer Hund. München etc.: Carl Hanser, 2009
- Le promeneur. Paris: Gallimard, 2008
- Vandreren. København: Tiderne Skifter, 2009
- Continued...
Rights sold
- Univers (Bucuresti, Roemenië)
- Anhui Literature & Art Publishing House (Hefei, China)
- Continued...