Peter Terrin
The Guard (De bewaker)
A clever novel about paranoia
Peter Terrin’s new novel, De bewaker (The Guard), is set largely in the underground car park of a huge luxury apartment block. Two guards, manager Harry and narrator Michel, are there to ensure the occupants’ safety. They are never relieved, but once in a while ‘the organisation’ brings them new supplies. Their assumption that the outside world has been hit by major disaster or a war is strengthened when all residents save one flee the building. Entirely isolated and living in severe circumstances, they are nevertheless totally absorbed in their task.
Since they hope to one day be part of the security officers’ elite and expect to be tested for this, they don’t want to make a single mistake regarding even their supplies deliverer as a potential threat.
When a third guard, a black man, arrives unexpectedly to fill a vacancy they didn’t anticipate, all fuses in their perception of reality blow. Is he an inspector? Is he so relaxed because he is testing their commitment? Does he want them to stop trusting each other? Harry is the first to derail – he tortures and kills the man. Then he and Michel take the lift to check the situation upstairs, but they lose each other inside the immense building. Michel meets Claudia, one of the occupants’ cooks. She cleans him up and pampers him. Then the last remaining resident also turns up and reassures Michel, so that he can return to the familiar cellar that has apparently shaped him irrevocably.
As in Peter Terrin’s novel Blanco (Blank), the world of these characters is destabilized, with everything taking place in their heads as they become detached from reality. Their initial alienation leads to distrust, restricted awareness, insensitivity, paranoia, and finally violent excess. It isn’t always clear to the reader when their twisted perception leads to delusion.
De bewaker addresses the reader on different levels. Peter Terrin himself suggested that his novel could be read as an allegory of the war in Iraq, but it is more. In the unusual tension and troubling atmosphere of the seclusion of this ‘huis clos’, he portrays a wide range of everyday emotions.
Publisher
De Arbeiderspers
Herengracht 370-372
NL - 1016 CH Amsterdam
TEL. +31 20 524 75 00
FAX +31 20 622 49 37
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.arbeiderspers.nl
Publishing details
De bewaker (2009, 256 pp)
Biography
Peter Terrin (b. 1968) wrote his debut, a collection of short stories titled De code (The Code), in 1998. After his first novel, Kras (Scratch, 2001), he broke through with Blanco (Blank, 2003), about a man who loses his wife due to a car-jacking. In Vrouwen en kinderen eerst (Women and Children First, 2004) a team of engineers and workmen disassembling a conveyor belt in a deserted factory confront a lifeless but inflexible opponent in indefinable, inhospitable surroundings, creating an ominous atmosphere. With it, Peter Terrin placed himself forever at the forefront of Flemish literature. In 2006, he published the collection of short stories, De bijeneters (The Bee Eaters). De bewaker, nominated for the Libris Literature Prize, confirms his talent as a stylist and a creator.
Quotes
Terrin has enriched Flemish literature with a clever novel about modern, yet simultaneously universal, paranoia that ends in a perfect psychological pas de deux.
De Morgen
De bewaker is a novel that leaves you astonished with its beauty and completeness.
NRC Handelsblad
A sublime book (…). This novel has an tremendous amount to offer, first and foremost a brilliantly told story.
Het Parool
Translations
Rights sold
- MacLehose Press (London, )
- Bompiani (Milano, Italy)
- Gallimard (Paris, Frankrijk)
- Continued...