Sometimes a novel can get across what others’ lives are like
more indelibly than the best-written news story. That’s certainly the
case for the Turkish-Dutch marriage at the heart of Jessica J.J. Lutz’s
new novel “De Nederlandse bruid” (De Geus, 2014)
Like good non-fiction, the confident handling of a faraway culture has clearly been years in the making and draws on decades of experience. But a well-told tale transports the reader more completely to the heart of a normally inaccessible group of characters. And at a time when Europe is struggling with questions of Muslim, Turkish and other integration, it neatly flips the debate on its head by following a European migrant into Muslim lands.
The story of “The Bride from Holland” is that of a young Dutchwoman, Emma, an under-employed recent university graduate who decides to follow love and the star of her fate. When her fellow-student boyfriend has to wrap up his studies in Holland suddenly and take over his dying father’s business, she leaves her homeland behind and travels east to stand at his side in his new job: Clan lord of a remote Euphrates mountain valley in Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands.
Despite her privileges, Emma soon finds she has exchanged the middle-class comforts of north Europe for hard work, chronic feuding, codes of family honor, everyday deaths, loves, jealousies, suffocating traditions and lies that live for generations -- the kind of all-or-nothing society that Shakespeare had to go to mediaeval Italy to find. For days after finishing the story, I couldn’t shake this completely convincing world out of my head and wished that I could have stayed a part of it for longer.
The tightly woven plot is seamlessly sustained -- a wedding, a murder, a suicide, adultery, treachery, ancient gold, a road, a mountain insurgents’ war and more -- without losing for a moment a sense of Turkey’s intimate, audio-visual reality. People live vividly in the present tense but are unable to cut themselves off from their past. And along the way, a first-disoriented Emma is forced to grow up, find herself and discover that even today, eastern-marcher lords and their ladies, like everyone else, have many a dragon to slay before they can hope to secure their realm or riches.
Lucky Dutch readers, who are already able to devour this book: Buy it now! And producers of Turkish sitcoms, you need look no further for your next dramatic story.
As for those worried Europeans who struggle to make sense of how their societies are becoming ever further intertwined with those of their Muslim countries to the east,
I hope one day you will get the chance to read “The Bride from Holland.” Europeans are right to be worried by the problems of slow development in their eastern neighborhood. But there’s a lot Europeans may not know and above all do not feel about their neighbors. When they finish a rare book like this, truly and elegantly able to reflect the inner dynamics of Anatolian society, they’ll find that they are a lot less scared.
Note EU-Digest: Not only every European, but certainly more inward and nationalistically inclined European politicians like Mr. Wilders should be reading this fantastically impressively written book.
Read more: The EU Way: Standing Europe’s Muslim integration debate on its head
Like good non-fiction, the confident handling of a faraway culture has clearly been years in the making and draws on decades of experience. But a well-told tale transports the reader more completely to the heart of a normally inaccessible group of characters. And at a time when Europe is struggling with questions of Muslim, Turkish and other integration, it neatly flips the debate on its head by following a European migrant into Muslim lands.
The story of “The Bride from Holland” is that of a young Dutchwoman, Emma, an under-employed recent university graduate who decides to follow love and the star of her fate. When her fellow-student boyfriend has to wrap up his studies in Holland suddenly and take over his dying father’s business, she leaves her homeland behind and travels east to stand at his side in his new job: Clan lord of a remote Euphrates mountain valley in Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands.
Despite her privileges, Emma soon finds she has exchanged the middle-class comforts of north Europe for hard work, chronic feuding, codes of family honor, everyday deaths, loves, jealousies, suffocating traditions and lies that live for generations -- the kind of all-or-nothing society that Shakespeare had to go to mediaeval Italy to find. For days after finishing the story, I couldn’t shake this completely convincing world out of my head and wished that I could have stayed a part of it for longer.
The tightly woven plot is seamlessly sustained -- a wedding, a murder, a suicide, adultery, treachery, ancient gold, a road, a mountain insurgents’ war and more -- without losing for a moment a sense of Turkey’s intimate, audio-visual reality. People live vividly in the present tense but are unable to cut themselves off from their past. And along the way, a first-disoriented Emma is forced to grow up, find herself and discover that even today, eastern-marcher lords and their ladies, like everyone else, have many a dragon to slay before they can hope to secure their realm or riches.
Lucky Dutch readers, who are already able to devour this book: Buy it now! And producers of Turkish sitcoms, you need look no further for your next dramatic story.
As for those worried Europeans who struggle to make sense of how their societies are becoming ever further intertwined with those of their Muslim countries to the east,
I hope one day you will get the chance to read “The Bride from Holland.” Europeans are right to be worried by the problems of slow development in their eastern neighborhood. But there’s a lot Europeans may not know and above all do not feel about their neighbors. When they finish a rare book like this, truly and elegantly able to reflect the inner dynamics of Anatolian society, they’ll find that they are a lot less scared.
Note EU-Digest: Not only every European, but certainly more inward and nationalistically inclined European politicians like Mr. Wilders should be reading this fantastically impressively written book.
Read more: The EU Way: Standing Europe’s Muslim integration debate on its head
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