These Are the Names

Starred review from September 19, 2016
Bestselling Dutch writer Wieringa’s (Joe Speedboat) novel offers two searing portrayals of transformation on the unforgiving Eurasian Steppe. Pontus Beg is a policeman in Michailopol, a once-thriving small town whose “demise had been as turbulent as its rise.” At 53, “still too young to really be considered old, but he could see the writing on the wall,” Beg reexamines his life’s work: not a failure, but perhaps not the path of wisdom he might have imagined as a child. When Yehuda Herz, one of the town’s two remaining Jews, is murdered, Beg investigates, and with the guidance of Rabbi Zalman Eder, he has a revelation that both haunts and rejuvenates him. In a parallel story, seven desperate refugees—five men, a woman, and a child—suffer betrayal and extraordinary hardship to make new lives in an elusive promised land. One of their number, a man imbued by the others with talismanic powers, brings Beg and the nomads together, irrevocably changing everyone. Biblical symbolism and themes of wandering, suffering, and redemption pervade the novel. There are echoes of John Steinbeck’s intrepid dust bowl survivors, the voyeuristic allure of Franz Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist,” and the quiet nihilism and documentary detail of British novelist Jim Crace. Wieringa, whose longtime collaboration with translator Sam Garrett pays off again with deft, muscular prose perfectly suited to the author’s harrowing vision, strips lives bare and drills to their essence.

Narrator Arthur Morey's storytelling skills are on full display in this bittersweet story. Dutch novelist Tommy Wieringa weaves the plight of a group of refugees set adrift on the Russian steppes with the story of Police Commissioner Pontus Beg. Beg is himself a lost soul who in midlife discovers that his mother was Jewish, which causes him to reconsider his beliefs. The lives of the starving wayfarers and the commissioner intersect after they're arrested and come under his care. Morey's vocal style and narrative gifts shine in his measured presentation of these haunted travelers and in his portrayal of the inner struggle of Pontus Beg--especially when his renewed faith is challenged by the horrific pasts of the interlopers. A.D.M. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine