Body, Mind & Health - Fiction, Literary Styles & Movements - Fiction, European Peoples & Cultures - Fiction & Literature, European Fiction - General
Log in to track your reading progress.
Overview
A visionary novel about desire, memory, and love, The Great Longing tells the poignant story of Sam van Dijk, a thirtyish young man who has lost all memory of his childhood up to the age of twelve, when his parents were killed in a mysterious car accident. Alienated and adrift in his life, working as a freelance archivist and living in a warehouse, Sam embarks on a journey of self-discovery through a contemporary landscape often dark and unexpectedly violent. He is alone in the world except for a twin sister, Lisa - the keeper of the family secrets, an artist whose marriage to a man she loves is in trouble - and his restless brother, Raph, a photographer. With these sibling ties as the only stable element in a narrative maelstrom, Sam gradually pieces together haunting shards of memory and retrieves the missing story of his life. In the process he discovers his own voice, and with it a longing for love and human connection. The setting of the novel is contemporary and urban - a Dutch city with its canals and wild nightlife; the cultural references - popular music, the assassination of JFK, the moon landing - are largely American. Marcel Moring's imaginative representation of how memory works is anchored in concrete detail and event, but his prose often soars. Rich in theme and style, with remarkably evocative imagery and impressive narrative control, The Great Longing introduces to this country a gifted writer whose work has already won impressive kudos abroad.Editorials
Patricia Hassler
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.Book Details
Published
May 1, 1995
Publisher
Harpercollins
Pages
211
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780060172435