Newsletter Foreign Rights De Bezige Bij, Thomas Rap, Cargo and Balans Summer 2012 Tommy Wieringa - Caesarion
* Great reviews in France, Germany and England
In our newsletter of June we presented to you Tommy Wieringa’s latest novel, Caesarion. Over 100,000 copies were sold in the Netherlands. Rights were sold to Germany (Hanser), England (Portobello) and France (Actes Sud). There have already been some great reviews: Germany: ‘Tommy Wieringa allows his characters to experience just about everything that is possible, even if it seems impossible.’ – Neue Zürcher Zeitung 'Tommy Wieringa has a special talent for being able to write a story so intense that it makes the reader cry, desperately try to control the tears, smile bravely and get curiously touched by the hardships and impositions of life, while reading the book to its end. Comforted. Something hidden between the lines is stronger than the grief.' – NDR Kultur 'These small objections, however, don’t detract from the author’s merit of having written a novel without hypocrisy and without too much sentimentality and which yet manages to touch deeply.' – Wiener Zeitung France: ‘Amazingly enough, Wieringa succeeds in telling us this story of solitude and rejection with humor and lyricism, introducing a character who strongly evokes the Kurtz of Heart of Darkness (or of Apocalypse Now), and thereby delivers a remarkable coming-of-age novel.’ – Libération ‘The contemporary American novel is based on this literary and moral ambition (and often marred by excessive naturalism). In France, no one seems capable of that. Houllebecq, when he tries, but he is more a satirist than a novelist… The ones who have successfully pursued this Grail in recent years (the list, however, is by no means exhaustive) are writers such as Roberto Bolaño in his The Savage Detectives, Sebald in Austerlitz, Coetzee in Disgrace and Philip Roth in My Life as a Man. From now on, however, to that list must be added the name of Tommy Wieringa: Caesarion, his second novel to be translated into French, has made it only modestly (much too modestly) onto the shelves of our bookstores, and it is a feast.’ – Le Figaro England: ‘Tommy Wieringa's ambitious novel, translated by Sam Garrett, is a brilliant exploration of the uneasy transition from adolescence into adulthood – the restlessness, yearning for stability, irrational decisions and erotic obsessions.’ – The Independent De Bezige Bij / The Busy Bee • h.deinum@debezigebij.nl