Author Description

Product Description When he was 12, Sam van Dijk's parents were killed in a mysterious car accident, and since then he has lost all memory of his childhood. Now in his 30s, alienated from society and adrift in life, he embarks on a journey of self-discovery -- one that takes him through the gritty, and sometimes violent landscape of a Dutch city and the tantalizing, ethereal fabric of his memory. With his restless brother and twin sister as his only links to the world of his childhood, he gradually pieces together the haunting shards of his past and retrieves the missing story of his life. In the course of a moving, emotional voyage, he solves a mystery and discovers his own voice -- and with it, a longing for love and human connection. In a masterful translation that captures the subtle voice, wry humor, visionary power and hypnotic readability of the original, The Great Longing is a rich, evocative novel that introduces America to a gifted writer whose work has already won impressive kudos abroad. From Publishers Weekly Dutch novelist Moring's first novel to appear stateside, a lyrical, mildly existential tale of memory lost and refound, is set in an urban desert of stylized alienation. Sam van Djik, 30, has lost possession of his past and, accompanied by his twin sister and an eccentric older brother, sets out to find and regroup the scattered pieces. The origin of Sam's amnesia is the car accident that killed his parents in his early youth; as his slightly deranged and hypersensitive mind moves restlessly backward through time, it alights again and again upon images of his childhood, in particular those of his dead father and mother. Sam's trauma leads him into inconsequentiality in adulthood as he drifts aimlessly into the lackluster profession of archivist, living in an abandoned warehouse and trawling through a hip but curiously innocuous underworld. Moring's writing can be supple and momentarily intriguing, but it lacks the intensity or originality to give the meandering, whimsical plot depth-or even surface excitement. Sam seems too casual and even-tempered to have been truly traumatized, and so his memory loss seems more like a literary device than a gripping pathology. The narrative's cute urban-wasteland setting comes off as overdesigned, as well. If he fails to forge a novel of dynamic unpredictability, however, Moring does show that he is capable of more interesting work down the line.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. About the Author Marcel Möring is the bestselling author of Mendel, The Great Longing, In Babylon, and The Dream Room. Widely considered the Netherlands' leading contemporary writer, he lives in Rotterdam with his wife and children. From the Publisher A sophisticated, evocative, and powerfully moving bestseller from Holland, winner of that country's most prestigious literary prize for fiction,The Great Longing is a picaresque novel of desire, memory and unconventional notions about love. From Booklist Somewhere in the danker areas of the Netherlands, young Sam van Dijk embarks on an odyssey to recapture his past and build his emotional future. In this first-person account, Sam admits he has no memories preceding his parents' suspicious deaths in an auto accident when he was 12. Soon after, he and his twin sister, Lisa, and older brother, Raph, are portioned out to foster homes and reunited years later as adults. Lisa, a bohemian artist, and Raph, a peripatetic photographer, serve as Sam's melancholy mentors in his search for someone to be, someone to love. Ironically, he works as an archivist, organizing others' memories, yet cannot determine his own provenance. Like the elusive girl in polka dots whom he hankers for when she occasionally appears outside his window, the faceless figures of his ancestors become permanent ghosts he must pursue. In his lyrical, literary, slightly erotic second novel, Moring shows us a man's "great lo