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Netherland

By Joseph O'Neill

(39)

| Others | 9780007275700

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Book Description

In early 2006, Chuck Ramkissoon is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal. In London, a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek hears the news, and remembers his unlikely friendship with Chuck and the off-kilter New York in which it flourished: the New York of 9/11, the powercut and the Iraq warContinue

In early 2006, Chuck Ramkissoon is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal. In London, a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek hears the news, and remembers his unlikely friendship with Chuck and the off-kilter New York in which it flourished: the New York of 9/11, the powercut and the Iraq war. Those years were difficult for Hans -- his English wife Rachel left with their son after the attack, as if that event revealed the cracks and silences in their marriage, and he spent two strange years in New York's Chelsea Hotel, passing stranger evenings with the eccentric residents. Lost in a country he'd regarded as his new home, Hans sought comfort in a most alien place -- the thriving but almost invisible world of New York cricket, in which immigrants from Asia and the West Indies play a beautiful, mystifying game on the city's most marginal parks. It was during these games that Hans befriends Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreamed of establishing the city's first proper cricket field. Over the course of a summer, Hans grew to share Chuck's dream and Chuck's sense of American possibility -- until he began to glimpse the darker meaning of his new friend's activities and ambitions.' Netherland' is a novel of belonging and not belonging, and the uneasy state in between. It is a novel of a marriage foundering and recuperating, and of the shallows and depths of male friendship. With it, Joseph O'Neill has taken the anxieties and uncertainties of our new century and fashioned a work of extraordinary beauty and brilliance.

Critics

  • Howzat?

    Netherland by Joseph O'Neill 247pp, Fourth Estate, £14.99 "What do they know of America who only America know?" So asked Joseph O'Neill in an essay he published last year on CLR James's Beyond a Boundary (1963), a classic of anti-colonial literature ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Fri, 24 Sep 2010

  • He's got something to declare

    Netherland by Joseph O'Neill Fourth Estate £14.99, pp247 Like Samuel Beckett, Joseph O'Neill is that rare thing, an Irishman with a fondness for that most English of games, cricket. In Netherland, his third novel, O'Neill writes about cricket not wit ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Fri, 24 Sep 2010

5 Reviews

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  • Amazing novel about Hans-- a dutch guy--living in America and married with an english women. He was in NY during 9/11 and also during the black out of 2003. He had a passion for cricket and met a strange Trinidadian guy, that later became his friend. The reader moves through space and time, followin ... (continue)

    Amazing novel about Hans-- a dutch guy--living in America and married with an english women. He was in NY during 9/11 and also during the black out of 2003. He had a passion for cricket and met a strange Trinidadian guy, that later became his friend. The reader moves through space and time, following the thoughts and memories of Hans. But it is also a picture of America and NY after 9/11.

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    Tweetybz said on Oct 5, 2011 | Add your feedback

  • Already a classic. I understand why O'Neill is among Zoe Heller and Safran Foer's favourite writers. An intimate tale of love and loss beautifully written. Even if you don't understand anything about cricket (as it's my case) you cannot but love this novel.

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    nuriape said on Jul 19, 2009 | Add your feedback

  • a marriage, new york, cricket, 9/11

    Very interesting mix - story of a man and his family and how the aftermath of 9/11 throws them off course but also leads to interesting discoveries (cricket in New York?). Great style, some interesting comments on life, a good read.

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    Gail Paris said on Feb 20, 2009 about the Hardcover edition | Add your feedback

  • It takes time, but then it becomes intriguing. USA cricket as a metaphor of migration and globalization, after 9/11: it doesn't sound very fascinating, at the beginning. Too much sport - and a very complicated sport for non-Commonwealth people. Yet the descriptions of New York and London are wonderf ... (continue)

    It takes time, but then it becomes intriguing. USA cricket as a metaphor of migration and globalization, after 9/11: it doesn't sound very fascinating, at the beginning. Too much sport - and a very complicated sport for non-Commonwealth people. Yet the descriptions of New York and London are wonderful - and also the reflections on the main character's marriage crisis. And the unexpected gangster turn does the rest. When it's over, you miss the already familiar narrative voice and you wish you could go on looking at the world with his perceptive eyes.

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    rayuela said on Feb 3, 2009 | Add your feedback

  • Quite different and not so easy to read. Might be easier and of more interest if one understands the game of cricket.

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    Rameycreek said on Jan 7, 2009 about the Hardcover edition | Add your feedback

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