The Great Longing (First Edition)

A journey of self-discovery finds Sam van Dijk searching for the answers behind his memory loss after the violent death of his parents and seeking grounding from two equally troubled siblings

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.

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 longing" for love that is not illusory, for a return to the peace at the origin of his odyssey. A skillfully rendered novel. Patricia Hassler

In this imaginative novel, Sam van Dijk has lived his life in an amnesiac fog (whether real or self-imposed is unclear). After Sam's parents were killed in a car accident when he was a child, he moved through a series of foster homes. His surroundings became a blur, and the people remained slightly out of focus. As a young adult, Sam is reunited with his brother and twin sister. His brother seems determined to forget the past, but his sister, in stark contrast to Sam, is determined to chronicle it. Sam finds work as an archivist, carefully and tediously piecing together company histories from documents and memorabilia, all the while unable to reconstruct his own history from fragments of memory and snatches of conversations. Part mystery, part existential tract, this novel won the equivalent of the Booker Prize in Moring's native Holland, where the book was a best seller. For serious literature collections.?Peggie Partello, Keene State Coll., N.H.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.