Wim Brands Reading Club: Falling Out of Time, by David Grossman

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Wim Brands, maker and host of the VPRO Boeken (Books) programme on radio and television, discusses festival guest David Grossman's novel Falling Out of time (2012) with the audience. But first, Dutch writers Sanne Terlouw and Toef Jaeger present their thoughts about the book.

Five years after the death of his son killed in war, Israeli writer David Grossman succeeds in the nearly impossible undertaking of writing about this loss in Falling Out of Time. The book's protagonist goes "there" to see his dead son. Along the way he is joined by fathers and mothers who can find no peace after the death of their child. In a long procession they pass by the Centaur, who has tried for years to put his grief about the death of his son into words. Writing, he says, is the only way to understand something. Finally he manages to find the right words, but at a high price: by finishing his memorial he has permanently lost his son.

Afterwards, you can attend the programme in which David Grossman is interviewed by Lex Bohlmeijer.

Information

Date and time Saturday 17 January 2015 from 14:30 to 15:45 hrs
Location Theater aan het Spui - Zaal 2

Line-up

Wim Brands

(Brummen, NL, 1959 - Amsterdam, 2016) was a poet, journalist, and media presenter. At a young age he debuted as a poet in the Dutch literary magazine Hollands Maandblad. Since then he has published books of poetry quite regularly, such as Neem me mee zei de hond (Take Me With You Said the Dog, 2010). After the publication of his first collection Inslag (Impact, 1985), he began working as an interviewer for the VPRO broadcasting company. Later he became head producer of the Radio 6 programme "De Avonden." Since 2005  he talked to writers on VPRO's book programme "Boeken" on both TV and radio. He put together Briefgeheimen (Postcard Secrets, 2007), a colourful compilation of postcards linked to a website where people can divulge their deepest secrets. Overkomst dringend gewenst (Return Voyage Urgently Requested), his anthology of the work of poet Jan Emmens, was published in 2012, and his most recent poetry collection, 's Middags zwem ik in de Noordzee (In the Afternoons I Swim in the North Sea) in 2014. Brands was one of the "Lonely Departure" poets who compose and present a final poetic tribute to people who pass away without friends or family.
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Toef Jaeger

(Bloemendaal, NL, 1971) is an editor with the daily NRC Handelsblad newspaper. Her book Koning eenoog, en migrantenverhaal (King One-Eye: An immigrant story) about Henk van Woerden was presented during the 2015 festival; the story of ever-seeking immigrant Van Woerden (1947-2005), who was a writer as well as a visal artist. He wrote a trilogy abut South Africa that received national and international attention, and which, in its rootlessness, forever changed Dutch literature about South Africa. In 2014 Het Boekenparadijs. De opkomst en ondergang van de grootste boekhandelsketen in Nederland (Book Paradise: The rise and fall of the biggest bookstore chain in the Netherlands) was published, which he co-wrote with NRC Handelsblad editor Hanneke Chin-A-Fo. It is a revealing and incisive reconstruction of the recent demise of the Polare chain.


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Sanne Terlouw

(Utrecht, NL, 1959) is a Dutch specialist, writer, and publicist. As a child she inspired her father, the D66 Party politician Jan Terlouw, to write novels. Oorlogswinter (Winter of War), for example, came about as a result of her questions about WWII. For three decades father and daughter had wanted to co-write a detective novel, a plan that came to fruition in 2005: the result is the hit series about the investigative duo Reders and Reders. Meanwhile, Sanne Terlouw had already published books under the pen name Ike Smitswater, such as Het graf in de tuin en andere verhalen (The Grave in the Garden and Other Stories, 1992) and Het raadsel van de familie Liezekies (The Mystery of the Liezekies Family, 1993). In 2000, she won the Libelle Novel Prize for Het strijkkwartet (The String Quartet). She has more than 60 titles to her name, both non-fiction (mainly focused on health and nutrition) and fiction. Father and daughter's latest novel In huis met een seriemordenaar (At Home with a Serial Killer) will be published in early 2015, based on the family's experiences with the infamous Van Z in the late 1960s.
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