In a Dark Wood

November 2, 2009
This flat novel by the esteemed Dutch author Möring (In Babylon
) is occasionally interesting but lacks much memorable material. In a sort of riff on A Christmas Carol
, Jacob Noah, a Holocaust survivor turned wealthy Dutch businessman, dies in a 1980 car accident near the town of Assen in the Netherlands. On the same night, the town is home to a massive rave, and this breakneck party forms the backdrop for Noah's peregrinations with the ghostly “Jew of Assen,” who takes dead Noah on a tour of the loved ones he lost contact with during his financial rise. On the same night, celibate intellectual Marcus Kopla has one last chance to win back Noah's daughter, Chaja, and though the fates of the two men don't intersect, they are linked by their love for Chaja. The novel is well conceived, and its free-form prose flows, but the characters don't come across, stripping the book of emotional impact and dramatic suspense. Moreover, the sprawling story's potentially intriguing historical and philosophical implications are never worked to their potential.

January 1, 2010
Dutch novelist Möring (The Dream Room, 2002, etc.) pulls out all the stops in this rich, complex, obscure and polyphonic narrative of a descent into the soul.

The pilgrim is Jacob Noah, who hid for the last three years of World War II. When he emerges, he finds his parents and brother gone and little meaning in his life. He returns to his father's shoemaking shop in the village of Assen in the Netherlands, marries a farmer's daughter and starts a family, but he remains haunted by his past and his inability to escape his Jewish identity. He succeeds beyond his expectations in becoming rich, yet feels empty and unfulfilled. After a car accident almost takes Jacob's life, he finds himself in the strange hands of a peddler called"The Jew of Assen," an embodiment of death who becomes a Virgil of sorts. (The book echoes Dante's Inferno, Homer, Greek mythology, Miles Davis and more.) When the peddler takes Jacob into his past and into his soul, it becomes clear that the shoemaker is no shrinking violet. When revisiting a particularly egregious act of anti-Semitism, Jacob puts his guide on the defensive by exclaiming,"So? Where were you? Were you a ghost in the shadows? Were you one of the people who stood laughing and watching along the side of the road?... Where were you?" At the end of the novel Jacob moves toward feeling at home in the here and now: In a cemetery called Beth Olam, Hebrew for"the house of eternity," he remembers that olam also means world and thinks,"House of the world…he liked the sound of it." Möring loves to experiment wildly with form, transforming parts of his narrative into cartoons, embracing digressions in enormous parentheses and using graphics to depict fireworks onomatopoetically.

Not for the faint of heart.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

February 1, 2010
In this fifth novel by acclaimed Dutch author Mring ("The Great Longing"), the reminiscences of dying Dutch Jewish businessman Jacob Noah alternate with the yearnings of Jewish intellectual Marcus Kolpa, who loves Noah's youngest daughter, Chaja. The novel takes place in June 1980, on the night before the annual international motorcycling race known as the Dutch TT, held in Assen and accompanied by much partying. Noah, the sole survivor of his family after the Holocaust, looks back on how he, one of the town's only remaining Jews, built a successful department store and raised a family. When his vision for the growth/development of Assen was rejected, Noah exacted revenge and now acknowledges his bitterness and guilt. Meanwhile, the rebellious Kolpa is back in town, eager to reignite a relationship with Chaja. VERDICT While the author has strategically placed his soul-searching central characters on a hellish stage strewn with the relentless drinking and rioting of the reckless biker race attendees, at times the incessant roaming and rambling of these two men can be hard to read and follow. Readers interested in contemporary European literature may find the narrative thought-provoking.M. Neville, Trenton P.L., NJ

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2010
His family killed by the Nazis, young Jacob Noah survived by hiding in a peat bog for three years. Decades later, Jacob Noah the successful but emotionally charred businessman runs his car off the road and plunges into a preternatural twilight journey through his hometown, the Dutch town of Assen. With a spectral figure calling himself the Jew of Assen as his guide, Jacob observes the lives of his neighbors and family from a distance, contemplating the circumstances of his estrangement amid the pulsing morass of Assen on the beery, smoky evening before its annual TT motorcycle race. Among those observed is Marcus Kolpa, an intellectual whose ambivalence about his identity as a young European Jew may be as intense as his unpronounced love for Jacobs free-spirited daughter, Chaja. Loosely, if self-consciously, playing upon Dantes Inferno, Mring deploys a prodigious m'lange of motifs and narrative styles (including concrete poetry and a brief comic-strip intermezzo), rendering this selection a virtuoso performance of sorts, at times as confounding as it is inspired.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)