Nicolette Smabers
The Gas and Electricity Man (De man van gas en licht)
A touching and intimate family saga
Nicolette Smabers once said in an interview, that ‘story telling is an act of love’. This statement characterizes the way she writes. Withholding important information from children, thus denying them the right to the truth, and resulting in a lopsided view of reality, plays a role in all of Smabers’ work.
Sixteen year-old Eva Porceleyn learns that her parents are planning to emigrate from The Hague in the Netherlands to California. This, to them, is the fulfilment of a long-cherished dream, and they hope that their daughter will be as excited as they are. Instead she bursts into tears. Emigrate to America? ‘You choose, Eva,’ says her father after hours of pleading, ‘between coming to the land of oranges and orchards, and growing sour in this damp and chilly country.’ Eva wants to stay on in the Netherlands, and she wants to become a teacher. Besides, she is in love. But if she stays, her parents and brothers will be gone, and she’ll have to live with her Uncle Leo and Auntie Amanda. Faced with this choice, Eva tries to understand the fraught relationship between her father and her uncle. She delves into her childhood, when her father told her stories every night, fairy tales, Bible stories and memories of the former Dutch East Indies, where the family lived before Eva was born, interwoven with stories about the fortunes of the Porceleyn family.
However, all the stories, fast paced and told with great delight, conceal important details. Eva discovers that some wounds are hard to heal, and that the past ‘is under a spell of silence’. Her search takes her to the 1920s, to a school playground in a town in the middle of Java, where her father and his brothers, children at the time, engaged in a fight which also raged outside: the one between black and white Dutchmen. De man van gas en licht (The Gas and Electricity Man) is a touching and intimate family saga showing the power of story-telling cutting across oceans and generations.
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: [email protected]
Website: www.debezigebij.nl
Publishing details
De man van gas en licht (2009, 302 pp)
Biography
Nicolette Smabers (b. 1948) wrote her debut, a well-received collection of short stories entitled De Franse tuin (‘The French Garden’), in 1983. She followed this with the novellas Portret van mijn engel (‘Portrait of my Angel’, 1987) and Chinezen van glas (‘Chinese in Glass’, 1991), and several children’s books. In 1992, she was awarded the Halewyn Prize. After several years of silence, she published her first novel, Stiefmoeder (‘Stepmother’) in 2003. In 2004, a new collection of her first three books, entitled De Franse tuin. Verhalen en novellen, (‘The French Garden. Stories and Novellas’) was published. De man van gas en licht (‘The Gas and Electricity Man’) is her second novel.
Website: www.nicolettesmabers.nl/
Dossier
Quotes
The press on Stiefmoeder (‘Stepmother’):
After twelve years she is back with a brilliant novel.
Trouw
A beautiful composition of carefully styled, evocative prose.
Het Parool
Subdued and highly moving.
Standaard der Letteren