Netherland (Taschenbuch)

Starred Review. Hans van den Broek, the Dutch-born narrator of O'Neill's dense, intelligent novel, observes of his friend, Chuck Ramkissoon, a self-mythologizing entrepreneur-gangster, that he never quite believed that people would sooner not have their understanding of the world blown up, even by Chuck Ramkissoon. The image of one's understanding of the world being blown up is poignant—this is Hans's fate after 9/11. He and wife Rachel abandon their downtown loft, and, soon, Rachel leaves him behind at their temporary residence, the Chelsea Hotel, taking their son, Jake, back to London. Hans, an equities analyst, is at loose ends without Rachel, and in the two years he remains Rachel-less in New York City, he gets swept up by Chuck, a Trinidadian expatriate Hans meets at a cricket match. Chuck's dream is to build a cricket stadium in Brooklyn; in the meantime, he operates as a factotum for a Russian gangster. The unlikely (and doomed from the novel's outset) friendship rises and falls in tandem with Hans's marriage, which falls and then, gradually, rises again. O'Neill (This Is the Life) offers an outsider's view of New York bursting with wisdom, authenticity and a sobering jolt of realism. (May)
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'[I have] not read anything that quite so brilliantly captured the exuberant madness and cultural diversity of [New York].' Jeremy Paxman, Guardian (Books of the Year) 'There is a very special sort of gratitude you can feel for a book that is so formidably written that it has you anxious to get back to it and pining a little bit to be away from it .' Sebastian Barry, Guardian (Books of the Year) Monica Ali, Guardian (Books of the Year) Hari Kunzru, Guardian (Books of the Year) Alex Clark, Sunday Telegraph (Books of the Year) 'Dazzling!and told with great grace and daring.' Kate Summerscale, Sunday Telegraph (Books of the Year) Rick Gekoski, Sunday Telegraph (Books of the Year) Boyd Tonkin, Independent (Books of the Year) 'The post-9/11 novel we've been waiting for: a witty, vivid, aphoristic, fiercely intelligent narrative.' Philip French, Observer (Books of the Year) 'Too good for the Booker.' Robert McCrum, Observer (Books of the Year) Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times (Books of the Year) 'Netherland is so expertly woven that it is impossible for a reader not to admire what it essentially is -- a beautifully written exploration of memory and self.' Sunday Telegraph 'The wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Centre fell. I devoured it in three thirsty gulps, gulps that satisfied a craving I didn't know I had. O'Neill seems incapable of composing a boring sentence or thinking an uninteresting thought.' New York Times 'Elegant and profound.' Sunday Times 'Extraordinary. O'Neill is a writer of dizzying elegance.' Financial Times 'It is hard to know which is stranger -- that a great American novel has been written about cricket, or that a great cricket novel should be set in America. But both are true. "Netherland" is ambitious, intelligent and deeply perceptive.' The Times 'O'Neill writes about cricket with an insider's knowledge and a metaphorical sweep. The result is the first great American novel underpinned by a deep understanding of the complexity of spin bowling. A novel full of vividly descriptive passages that possess a heightened, almost hallucinatory, brilliance. A great American novel with an ordinary European everyman at its centre.' Observer 'New York is not what most people imagine it to be. Just as marriage, family, friendship and manhood are not. "Netherland" is suspensful, artful, psychologically pitch-perfect, and a wonderful read. But more than any of that, it's revelatory. Joseph O'Neill has managed to paint the most famous city in the world, and the most familiar concept in the world (love) in an entirely new way.' Jonathan Safran Foer 'O'Neill writes a prose of Banvillean grace and beauty, shimmering with truthfulness, as poised as it unsettling. As well, this is a story that is hard to put down, for its characters are so real and their preoccupations so urgently of the now, that the book has the vividness of breaking news. He is a master of the long sentence, of the half-missed moment, of the strange archeology of the troubled marriage. Many have tried to write a great American novel. Joseph O'Neill has succeeded.' Joseph O'Connor 'Somewhere between the towns of Saul Bellow and Ian McEwan, O'Neill has pitched his miraculous tent!The reader, almost imperceptibly, becomes little by little scorched by the novel's brilliance, irradiated by it, benignly." Sebastian Barry 'A poetic and alarming book.' Metro 'This is a multi-faceted, poignant and considered novel, which, through the small-fry story of one man's struggle for the meaning in his marriage, career and an unknowable New York, does something momentous: it evokes life for all of us.' Time Out (Book of the Week) Book of the Year -- Evening Standard Book of the Year -- Spectator Book of the Year -- Telegraph