Gerbrand bakker biography of william hill

Pierre Lemaître’s The Great Swindle is probably the best novel I never reviewed. I have fond memories of a summer’s driving back and forth, to and from the Edinburgh Book Festival, held captive by every second of a narrative 15 hours long. Trouble with audio books and driving, there are no notes to help review afterwards. Still that was a summer I’ll never forget, and I urge you not to miss out on The Great Swindle – it’s terrific, and the film (See you up there) is pretty good too.

All Human Wisdom, released earlier this month, is the second in Lemaître’s between-the-wars trilogy, and my review will appear on the European Literature Network sometime today. Both books have been translated by Frank Wynne, The Great Swindle winning the CWA International Dagger in 2016, an award which Frank Wynne has won 4 times … to date. 😉

In fact, it’s a rare translation prize list that doesn’t include a Frank Wynne translation, and it’s becoming increasing common for him to feature not once but twice on a variety of longlists as he translates from French and Spanish. I won’t list all the awards he has won – I’ll let him do that. 2021 has already delivered its first “Wynner” in the form of Animalia which is the recipient of the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize.

So I am absolutely thrilled to welcome Frank to the blog today,

How did your career in literary translation begin?

Like many people of my generation, completely by accident. I have had half a dozen “careers” before I stumbled into literary translation. Having worked in radio in Ireland, I left for Paris at the age of 22 (having never set foot in France, and never spoken the language – since there was no oral exam at leaving cert). I quickly fell in love with the language and the literature, and spent more than three years living in Paris (working in a bookshop). I moved to London with a passion for French and for bandes dessinées, and I ran a small French bookshop in Kensington,

So after ANOTHER small hiatus Other People’s Bookshelves is back… Hoorah! Thank you to everyone who has responded to my plea for more of you to share your book porn with us, keep them coming as I would love this series to run and run. If you haven’t heard back from me, have sent them before but not been featured or you have held back thinking there’s a queue (it’s a small one) then do please email savidgereads@gmail.com with the subject Other People’s Bookshelves and they will be featured. I have been a bit slack. Anyway, for the fifteenth in the series we get to have a lovely nosey through Janet O’Kane’s shelves, first though (I know you are desperate to see the books, the books, the books) let us find out a little bit more about Janet…

As Janet grew up in rural Dorset her parents instilled in her an immense love of books. They tried not to spoil her (she was an only child) but she was provided with all the books she ever wanted, either from the library or bought from a local second‑hand shop. For a long time she answered the question, ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’ with, ‘A librarian’. Despite this, her first job was in Harrods, the London store, where she sold Wedgwood china to rich tourists and underwear to the then 007, Roger Moore. She also worked for Boots for many years, although that company’s lending libraries were long gone. Now living in the Scottish Borders with her husband John, two dogs, two cats and numerous chickens, Janet still reads as much as she can and has a deep mistrust of anyone else who doesn’t. She mostly reads crime fiction, despite the best efforts of an Open University degree course and the Berwick Book Group to entice her away from that genre.

Janet has always written for pleasure, and remembers winning a Brooke Bond writing competition at the age of ten with a short story inspired by Mary Norton’s The Borrowers. She started writing in earn

I first became aware of Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker’s work back in 2013 when I read his novel The Detour, which went on to win the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize that year.  Since then, I’ve tried a couple more, The Twin and June (both, like The Detour, translated by David Colmer), but that was almost ten years ago now.  A few weeks back, however, there was a random serendipitous appearance in my letter box, courtesy of Scribe Publications, namely Bakker’s latest work to appear in English.  It’s another story of low-key lives, and a turning point, but there’s also a rather dramatic element to the tale, one that is to shake up a life that had settled into a comfortable rut…

*****
The Hairdresser’s Son (translated by David Colmer), a slow-burning, atmospheric novel, is the story of Simon, a man in his mid-forties.  Working in his small barber’s shop, mostly to appointment, he spends much of his time gazing out of the window or doing laps down at the local pool.  He occasionally goes out and picks up a man to satisfy his sexual needs, but on the whole his is a tranquil and solitary existence.

While he leads a fairly ordinary life, one unusual thing about him is the lack of a father.  He was born in September 1977, six months after the death of his father in a plane crash, something his mother has always been unwilling to talk about.  Simon hasn’t wanted to probe, but suddenly the time seems right, and he starts to look into the incident, wondering why there’s been no closure.  The more he learns, the more he asks himself if there’s a chance, even a tiny one, of his father still being out there, somewhere, with his own dull, everyday existence.

The crash mentioned, a disaster in Tenerife involving Dutch and American planes, is real, and the incident provides the focal point around which Bakker’s novel develops, a turning point for our hairdresser friend:

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