"I don't feel like writing at the moment. "After this renovation is finished, I will have a wonderful writing cabin - with a veranda." He will put it to use – later. "I'm satisfied – contented – and I'm making a garden." So any future book will have to wait for creative seeds to germinate, although his multi-voiced second adult novel June (2009) will appear in English in due course. What he's doing at present is renovating a house in Germany. It emerged, he recalls, from a "hugely depressed" period. Only now do I see that this book is terribly much about myself". Yet he gives every impression of strolling lightly over the hallowed turf of literature. Now, with the Independent prize, he has beaten the world again. The Twin, his first novel for adults but one rooted again in a sharp and sure grasp of the febrile world of childhood, won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2010 against competition from every continent. I think I absolutely put that in my books."Īs a published author, Bakker began with a young-adult title in 1999. "We West Frieslanders have a very cool, dry humour. Bakker ascribes this elliptical comic touch to his home province in the Netherlands. Speaking in not-quite-flawless English, the Dutchwoman half-understands natives of this Welsh-speaking heartland who may themselves be talking in their second language – another challenge to which translator David Colmer rises with total conviction. For all its mood of past trauma, present dislocation and future threat, The Detour rolls out stretches of deadpan culture-clash comedy. And, beyond the appreciation of a "beautiful but slightly menacing landscape", his novel captures its inhabitants and their idiosyncrasies. He visits friends in north Wales once a year, and has climbed Snowdon "at least" 11 times: "It's one of my favourite mountains". It haunts even the ravishing but sinister scenery that Bakker – and David Colmer, who takes half of the £10,000 award for his immersive translation – evoke with such a flair for the beguiling mystery of this landscape and its inscrutable people.īakker knows his setting. The past, her own and others', will catch up and find her. I love it!" In the BBC-loving Netherlands, he reports "You can watch it every day." Of course, his fugitive heroine's choice of viewing is hardly random. Does he see Escape to the Country? "I watch it. Going AWOL from her own life, pursued by demons that gradually come into the reader's view, she flees to north Wales and settles into a place of beauty, strangeness - and gathering menace.Īfter Bakker's victory - a genuine surprise for the novelist, who had travelled from Amsterdam for the ceremony – I asked him about the curious allure of daytime property shows. The Detour, which on Monday won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for the Dutch author and his outstanding translator, David Colmer, tells the eerie, unsettling and gently devastating story of a Dutchwoman who stages her own escape to the country. I can state with a reasonable degree of certainty that, before Gerbrand Bakker's The Detour, no other major novel from continental Europe had ever featured characters who watch the BBC's rural relocation series Escape to the Country.
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