Translated from Dutch by Ina Rilke, Otto de Kat’s slender novel manages to seem both restrained and monumental. With great economy of language, it encompasses a complex plot, a moral conundrum and an exploration of memory. In 1941 the Verschuur family are separated in three different countries: Oscar, a diplomat, is in Switzerland, semi-detached from officialdom; his wife, Kate, is in London, helping in a hospital; their daughter Emma is a hostage to fortune as the wife of a German official. An important piece of war information, passed to Oscar by his daughter, ricochets around the relationships, causing untold damage. What should be done with this knowledge? Could it save lives or will it cause yet more misery? A particular characteristic of the novel is that it confounds expectations: what seem like obvious plot twists looming ahead are almost wilfully avoided, repeatedly wrong-footing the reader. Key to the book’s dreamlike power is its meditation on the idea that the past continues to resonate in the present and that “forgetting is the enemy of happiness”.
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