Dutch Fado - Hollandse fado, Atlas 2000
Hollandse fado - Dutch Fado
1958. The era of banging coal stoves and bulging families. A cold of Churchill is frontpage news. In Holland calm and quietness still reign. The war is not forgotten, but also not being talked about. Signs of great changes are visible and at the same time invisible. People work hard for the future, saturdays too. Everywhere hordes of children play outside.
Huizing always wanted to be a sailor, but first the war interfered and then love. He and Jet married and started living in a new housing estate in a village swallowed up by the town. Huizing ends up in a stifling filing department of a bank and has been trudging along there for years.
As love seeps out of Huizing's marriage, he abandons himself to his old longing for the sea. Jet turns sour. The children suffer. Especially eldest son Guus, retarded but in some respects the opposite of retarded, touches him deeply. Then Louise comes working at the filing department, a dizzying ethnic cocktail with blood in her veins from nearly all the countries Huizing has been dreaming of. Violently Huizing is torn between fatherly duties and secret desires. Getting more and more in distress he discovers important insights about himself and life.
Hollandse fado, 270 p., Atlas 2000
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