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    Netherland
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    Netherland
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    Netherland
    Audiobook8 hours

    Netherland

    Written by Joseph O'Neill

    Narrated by Jefferson Mays

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, Hans--a banker originally from the Netherlands--finds himself marooned among the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and son return to London. Alone and untethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who is part idealist and part operator, introduces Hans to an "other" New York populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality.

    Hans is alternately seduced and instructed by Chuck's particular brand of naivete and chutzpah--by his ability to a hold fast to a sense of American and human possibility in which Hans has come to lose faith.

    Netherland gives us both a flawlessly drawn picture of a little-known New York and a story of much larger, and brilliantly achieved ambition: the grand strangeness and fading promise of 21st century America from an outsider's vantage point, and the complicated relationship between the American dream and the particular dreamers. Most immediately, though, it is the story of one man--of a marriage foundering and recuperating in its mystery and ordinariness, of the shallows and depths of male friendship, of mourning and memory.

    Joseph O'Neill's prose, in its conscientiousness and beauty, involves us utterly in the struggle for meaning that governs any single life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books Audio
    Release dateJan 9, 2009
    ISBN9781436169585
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for Netherland

    3.5/5

    971 ratings94 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Netherland is one of those delightful novels that sweeps you into its world on the force of the author's beautiful use of language and narrative insight. Hans van den Brock is an alien in many senses. He is Dutch and living alone in New York City in 2006, as his wife, thrown by 9/11 and its aftermath, has taken the couple's young son and gone back to England, where she is from. Hans' sporting passion is cricket, and he soon gets involved with what he discovers to be a vibrant cricket scene in New York, playing as one of the only white men among a community of cricketers from the West Indies and South Asia. He soon makes the acquaintance of a forceful yet shadowing fellow, one Chuck Ramissoon, who is a-swirl with schemes and dreams and leaking knowledge on all sorts of subjects. The main theme, as I have noted, is alienation, but also perseverance in the face of sadness and loss. There are some passages that struck me so effectively that I went back and read them several times, and the plot moves along nicely, with swooping digressions and flashbacks that are seamless.The book is not perfect, certainly. Hans is a bit too much of that common fictional character, the emotionally passive person to whom life just sort of happens without his willing it. He is perceptive, so he can describe it well, but he's almost never in control. Also, the side theme of the cultural and national tapestry that is New York City seems a bit overdone to me. Just about every third world nationality is eventually mentioned, either on a cricket pitch or in a taxi cab, or in a restaurant or party. When Hans hails a ride from a Kyrgyz cabbie, I thought, "OK, I get it, already."But those are relatively minor quibbles. This book won the PEN/Faulkner Award and I can see why. It provides a very rewarding and enjoyable reading experience.
    • 3/5
      I've got mixed feelings on this one... Some moments of brilliance, but other times it was scattered and hard to follow. Not an easy read regardless. The story was also rather ordinary, don't expect an epic adventure here, but simply a story about a dutch/english immigrant who spends some time in NYC.
    • 4/5
      Whistful ruminations of a Dutch immigrant in post 911 NYC. Best aspects of the book are the Trinidad sidekick and cricket obsession. The book offers an authentic, but not over the top, glimpse at an overlooked but insighful corner of our country.
    • 2/5
      Cricket, followed by more cricket. Finally, a dash more of cricket.
    • 4/5
      Along with the NYT, I counted this as one of my own best reads of 2008--which was, by the way, a complete surprise, since the blurb struck me as wholly unexciting and almost pretentious. However, the book was a thorough delight: gorgeous, tragic, full of a lasting emotional resonance.
    • 2/5
      Good, but I guess I was expecting better. I have to admit I'm a bit puzzled about how this book got a rep for being intimately linked with/part of the cultural moment that is/was the sept. 11 attacks. I guess I'm failing to see the deeper connection?
    • 3/5
      Although somewhat dry and too much cricket explanations in some parts, I like the reflective quality of this novel. An englishman who moves to New York with his wife (just for 3 years) ends up staying longer after his wife and small sun returns to England. He befriends a questionable man, Ramkissoon, and trys to create a life around cricket, which is not very popular in the U.S. You are emmersed in his life, every detail, his inadequacies with his wife and others, he is somewhat of a coward- but a true portrayal.
    • 2/5
      The portrayal of the seedier side of NYC is fascinating, as is life in the Chelsea Hotel, with its many permanent, eccentric residents. But really??! Huge portions of the book are devoted to describing the game of cricket. The jacket cover should make that clear for those who are completely uninterested in learning about that sport!
    • 4/5
      Netherland is an interesting look at a man orginally from Holland who works between London and NYC. It's an interesting study and one man's take on the culture of the city surrounding 911, though it actually talks about cricket more than it talks about terrorism. Hans is a banker and lives in the Chelsea Hotel, which should sound more romantic but one gets the idea that he takes all his money for granted and doesn't relish every moment of his existence like some might leading the same one. Hans isn't a bad guy and he's intellectually astute in many ways, drawing comparisons between his old neighborhood and those of NYC and meeting a whole host of interesting men from various backgrounds and ethnicity, all bonding under the guise of their favorite sport, Cricket, which they think could become more popular than baseball.

      He's also a man with a young son and a wife who would rather be anywhere else but NYC after 911. She doesn't feel safe and instead lets her extreme anxiety rule her decisions. Hans seems lost and lonely and this book is sort of about that but, at the same time, his difficulties and any emotional behavior seems also subdued...maybe it's a cultural thing.

      I found that this book was quite intriguing but I think it suffered from one of the things many novels do-it just doesn't have a very likable protagonist. Hans isn't a bad guy but I can't really relate to a banker who thinks $6,000 a month rent in early 2000s is just petty change. It just doesn't sit well with me. It makes him unlikable...and also, difficult to relate to. Hans is not a common man dealing with a common man's struggle. Hans is a rich male banker and he's hard to feel sorry for. He's investing in oil and making a fortune. Yet, he doesn't seem to have any big ethical struggles with the amount of money he is making and how he is making it. He just goes with the flow so to speak.

      Anyhow, worth reading, especially if you happen to love bankers from Holland.

      Memorable quotes:

      pg. 28 "My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time."

      pg. 89 "...Manhattan was squarely revealed and guarded by colossal billboards, I pitched homeward into its pluvial lights."

      ...

      "I was young. I was not much extracted from the innocence in which the benevolent but fraudulent world conspires to place us as children."

      pg. 106 "A life seemed like an old story."

      pg. 111 "I recall, also, trying to shrug off a sharp new sadness that I;m only now able to identify without tentativeness, which is to say, the sadness produced when the mirroring world no longer offers a surface in which one may recognise one's true likeness."

      pg. 126 "I was thinking of the miserable apprehension we have of even those existences that matter most to us. To witness a life, even in love-even with a camera-was to witness a monstrous crime without noticing the particulars required for justice."

      pg. 151 "The day itself was perforated by the rattle of a woodpecker."

      pg. 173 "We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. Otherwise, how to account for much of one's life?"

      pg. 204 "I'm saying that people, all people, Americans, whoever are at their most civilised when they're playing cricket. Whats' the first thing that happens when Pakistan and India make peace? They play a cricket match. Cricket is instructive, Hans. It has a moral angle. I really believe this....We want to have something in common with Hindus and Muslims?...With the New York Cricket Club, we could start a whole new chapter in US History."

      pg. 212 "Love...is such an omnibus word."

      pg. 247 "There was much smiling, pointing, physical intertwining, kissing. Everybody looked at the Statue of Liberty and at Ellis Island and at the Brooklyn Bridge, but finally, inevitably, everybody looked to Manhattan. The structures clustered at its tip made a warm, familiar crowd, and as their surfaces brightened ever more fiercely with sunlight it was possible to imagine that vertical accumulations of humanity were gathering to greet out arrival. The day was darkening at the margins, but so what..."

    • 2/5
      After all the hype, this was disappointing. Cricket scenes were the best, but otherwise it wasa unclear (and mostly uninteresting) where characters and story were going.
    • 4/5
      Hans van den Broek is a top-earning financial guru who, untethered from life by the events of 9/11 and the defection of his wife (and son), finds his own guru in criminal/entrepreneur Chuck Ramkissoon. Hans is emotionally adrift in New York City, and finds his anchor in a cricket league, where he meets Chuck. Chuck imparts a joie de vivre, and a sense of history, of connectedness, using cricket as a metaphor, explaining to Hans that cricket was the original American sport of choice, before it was displaced by baseball. Hans is enlisted in Chuck's "Field of Dreams" project: to create a classic cricket field which, Chuck believes, will restore the proper place of cricket in the American soul. Hans learns that life must be responded to on the fly, just as a cricket batter must learn to respond to the unpredictable rolls and bounces of a cricket ball. The story isn't told in a linear fashion, but skips around in time. This is done for a reason, as some events take on their full meaning only in retrospect. I appreciate how O'Neill, like Hemingway, can often express things effectively by what is not said, rather than by what is said.
    • 4/5
      I have been trying to write a review of this book for several days without much success. I have been adrift, though not quite as adrift as the main character, Hans, after his wife leaves him alone in post-9/11 New York City and returns with their son to England . Umberto Eco says that "the list is the origin of culture" and that his own novels are "full of lists". So, too, this book. Hans tries -- whether he realizes it or not -- to create order out of chaos, to connect with people, to get back on solid ground (something a Dutchman would have a feel for, I imagine) -- and his mind is a swirl of lists, so perhaps I should try a list of my own to explain why I so admire this book:That title: Netherland. Nether-land. Nethermost. Netherworld. Neverland. Never. Nether. Land.The Walt Whitman poem with which the book begins: "I dreamed in a dream". It's the way Hans moves from memory to dream to childhood to the characters he meets in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel to the long drives he takes with his West Indian-American friend, Chuck Ramkissoon, whom he meets due to their shared love of cricket.Cricket: At its essence cricket is about order and white-on-green and tea and sportsmanship and things done properly, things Hans longs for. Early in the book, he says that there is no such thing as cheap longing -- "Who knows what happened to that fellow over there?"Whitman again: His "invincible city." New York seemed anything but that at the moment it was attacked in 2001, and yet, and yet, it's still there. And Hans is still there, and despite the shock and the grief and the being-set-adrift, maybe there's still some way to hold on . . . list, dream, memory.History: There is so much of American history in this book, so many opportunities to consider the damage done in the name of empire -- and the good, too, and the blending of cultures -- cricket, the English language, the influence of its Dutch past on the city of New York. Who we are now -- what we do to one another now -- shaped by events and decisions and accidents and whims long past. Hans and Chuck visit a statue of Horace Greeley, his "Go West, young man" having sent so many in search of their American dream. Dreams again. Whitman. Song of myself. Chuck's song of himself -- his long rambling prose-poem of hopes and dreams and prospective deals.New York City: New Amsterdam. New Netherland. The port, the city through which so many exiles and immigrants have come, Miss Liberty, the merchants, the shopkeepers, the craftsmen, the businessmen, the banks, the stock exchange, the World Trade Center. The great melting pot. The United Nations. The Empire State. The art of the deal. The hustle.And, once more, Whitman: The "City of Friends". There is a wonderful passage in this book about the nature of male friendships, the need of men to have friends (and allies and business associates) who take you at face value, not looking too deeply, not sharing too much, which is how he takes Chuck, for better or worse. Like Hans Brinker, skating on the surface. Hans' wife, Rachel, would have been suspicious of Chuck from the start, but she's not there. Chuck is. And what a fascinating character he turns out to be. The Dutchman and the (West) Indian: 1626. Peter Minuit and the Indians. The purchase of Manhattan for $24 worth of trinkets. Hard not to think of that as you travel the city in the company of our two businessmen: Hans, the stock broker, and Chuck, the dealmaker, the entrepreneur, the hustler, the American dreamerThe way the story begins: Hans is preparing to leave his job as a stock analyst for a London bank to take a similar job in New York. A colleague who lived in New York for a time several years before comes to wish him well and to tell him to enjoy his time there. There is a certain wistfulness in what he says, as though his time in America was memorable and perhaps more than that. What will it be for Hans? Later, he realizes that if he'd stayed in London he would have been finished, locked in place by early middle age. But America is different: "selfhood's hill always seemed to lie ahead". A wistfulness. The frontier. Just across the next hill. King of the hill. Winthrop's city on a hill.The love story: Several love stories, really, overlapping, connecting, weaving, forming a lifeline to save yet another lost soul, while another soul is lost in the struggle. There's even an angel. America, the refuge for those in need of a second chance, a new beginning, a way to reinvent yourself, a way to survive the worst disaster and keep on going. America, the energizer bunny. How many lost souls? How many souls saved? Our need for story: Our need to create order out of chaos. One of my favorite minor characters -- and there are many -- is the woman who will take your photos and put them in order and create a scrapbook for you -- a story to give meaning to the mess that is your life. "People want a story," she says.Hans' mother: Keep an eye on her eyes. Keep your eyes on the prize. This is a prize of a book, a book to fall into, to allow its lists and dreams and memories and images and characters to work on you. I recommend it.
    • 3/5
      I saw this book on LT and it was well praised. The blurb on the back about being marooned in a hotel with its strange occupants, sold me. I was expecting something different. What I wasn't expecting was a 9/11 story. I avoid them like the plague. Its too soon to have anything meaningful to say, and frankly I am tired of wallowing in the tragedy. I also was not expecting to get a tome on Cricket, most of which I found extremely boring.I did not enjoy the book, and mostly couldn't wait for it to end. I gave it 3 stars, but then downgraded to 2.5.The story is about a European couple (English & Dutch) who move from England to NYC. They arrive before 9/11. They are close enough to Ground Zero that they have to move out of their loft when the attack happens. It is why they are in the odd hotel with the wacky people. It is a residential hotel, so the odd people live there permanently. On the one hand their reaction enraged me, they didn't think they had to do anything to protect the country. As ordinary citizens, even visitors they can't expect that it is always someone else's responsibility (police, military) so they can live their lives with no responsibilities of their own. The country was good enough for them to avail themselves of all its benefits, but god forbid they might be frightened or inconvenienced, or expected to change. The average person needs to be calm, brave, and carry on with their lives - which is how they can help to protect the country, not hiding under the bed and whining. Of course I am an Army brat and grew up knowing that we would always be on the front line, especially when overseas.On the other hand I can sympathize with the uncertainty that 9/11 brought. There is a giant high bridge that goes to Charlestown near Boston. I never use it, but once when they were doing construction I ended up on it by mistake. It was dark and late, and the bridge seemed like an upside down U. I felt like I was climbing to the sky. It was just after 9/11, and I didn't expect the bridge to fall or be blown up (though I did think about it), but previously I never would have doubted a massive structure. We don't have quakes or any really destructive weather. So I can sympathize that it must have been very scary to work in a tall building in NYC after the event.The POV character is the Dutch husband, Hans. He is weak, wishy-washy, and doesn't know what he wants or how to say it. His marriage falls apart after 9/11, and his wife takes their son and returns to England. He can't really identify the problem, so he has no clue what to do about it. Since he is on his own, Hans starts to hang around with the odd characters in the hotel. He also becomes obsessed with his childhood game of Cricket. He ends up befriending an umpire named Chuck, a man from Trinidad who turns out to have criminal tendencies and who comes to a very bad end once Hans returns to the UK.Unfortunately Hans is not interesting as a character, his wife is vile and the rest of the cast are not very interesting either. They are small sketches, but not really people. They aren't that odd either - except for the Angel, but he gets very little stage time. Chuck seems to be a stereotypical non-white immigrant. The book in fact is filled almost exclusively with non-white immigrants. Perhaps that is what modern NYC is like, but its not my experience as a visitor to the city, though to be fair I don't wander off the tourist track. I think it is just the sphere Hans hangs out in. He or the author has a need to be the only white man in the group ? Which brings up the other issue about Hans. He is supposed to be Dutch, but in his life he talks and often thinks as though he were actually English. There are Dutch references, but also English that seem to include him in the group. The narrative also jumps around from far past (childhood), near past (college), and then it hops into the future, when Hans and his wife are reconciled and living in the UK. He will say he hardly spent any time with Chuck, but then spend an entire paragraph describing his thoughts, actions, and motivations; Information that could only have been gained by the end of their relationship, but being applied at the start.There was a lot of minutiae about Cricket from famous players, to grass type, its care, maintenance, and field construction. Then he went on about different batting, and pitching techniques, and Han's childhood memories of the games. We also got the history of Cricket in the US, and descriptions of games and venues. Even if Cricket was a metaphor for life, its massively boring if you aren't into Cricket or if you know nothing about it. Much of it has a lingo of its own and is incomprehensible. The final problem was the actual writing itself. The sentence structure is so long, and convoluted, it should have drawn jail time. The story jumps forward and backward, and other than Cricket there is no real focus.
    • 3/5
      Couldn't finish it. It wasn't for me.
    • 3/5
      O'Neill's Blood Dark Track is one of the most interesting books I've read, so I expected a lot from Netherland - but for me, it didn't really deliver. One of the problems is that for a book structured around the idea that the ritual (rather than the sport) of cricket can be both a social unifier and a sea of calm in the emotional maelstrom of post 9/11 America, the narrator err....isn't very convincing on cricket. Its as though Death in the Afternoon was written by someone who hadn't seen a bullfight. This might be a bit harsh - but it seemed to me like a description of cricket written for the benefit of people of who don't understand it (ie Americans) rather than those who do (everyone else in the former British empire). As someone who does understand cricket, and living in a mainly non cricket playing country, missing its social element, I couldn't really believe in the narrator's voice - and so couldn't really believe in this central principle. So although other elements of the book - the characters at the Chelsea Hotel, the relationship with the over reaching Ramkissoon, the conflict between cold fish narrator and his politically awakening wife, are interesting, I ultimately couldn't care about them So a good idea, well written, which ultimately didn't quite work for me, however much I wanted it to. But worth reading
    • 3/5
      I understand why some people love this book so much, especially if they ever have lived in New York. The writing is beautiful and I found parts of the book to be really intriguing. However, as a whole, I felt I was just reading to read. I didn't feel invested and some of the stories seemed pointless. It's not a bad book by any means, but I didn't find it to be overwhelmingly amazing either.
    • 5/5
      Really enjoyed this book. Narrated from the viewpoint of a Dutch Wall Street analyst Hans Van Den Broek who moves to New York in 1999, the story follows the period post 9/11 when his marriage becomes frayed and his English wife moves back to London with their young son. Emotionally numbed and estranged both from his family and the unfamiliar city in which he lives, and increasingly, from his job, Hans' discovery of a cricket club (played mostly by immigrants) allows him him to discover both a sense of camaraderie, friendship (with a Trinidadian immigrant and Brooklyn hustler Chuck Ramkissoon) and a way to reconnect with his own childhood and memories. Chuck meanwhile is driven by a gloriously unlikely dream - to build a cricket ground in NY that would become the staging ground for international cricket clashes between the best teams in the world.Having for a short time been an immigrant studying in the USA as well as a cricketing aficionado, Hans' circumstances struck a real chord. Cricket is one of those odd sports which is virtually a religion in a handful of countries but almost absolutely unknown in the US. Almost but not quite, for the US is a also a country of immigrants and just as Hans does in the book, one can suddenly stumble upon a small group of cricket fans or an impromptu cricket match in the most unexpected nooks and crannies of the country. The realization sets in that there is a community with whom one has something in common - like a secret handshake, a love of cricket gives you access to a secret society hidden beneath the surface of everyday American life. So some of my fondest memories are of unlikely cricket matches played in an open field with a motley band of cricketers - mostly of Indian descent with a couple of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis and a solitary New Zealander. We managed to entice one of the natives to join us and of course he batted like a baseball player, using the long handle and swinging high and hard to send the ball soaring in to the air. I on the other hand preferred batting in a compact, restrained fashion, much like Hans in the book, playing the ball along the ground in the technically correct manner. In the book Chuck encourages Hans to play his shots with more abandon, urging him to play like an American and hit the ball up in the air.In many ways the story is about Chuck more than the Hans. Certainly he is the fizzing soul of the book, though it seems fitting to the tone of the book that the narrator is at the periphery of events. (Most of the major 'events' that occur in the book occur off-page as it were and are referred to only obliquely - whether 9/11 itself, Hans' reconciliation with his wife, his decision to move and most importantly Chuck's demise). Another reviewer has pointed out Chuck's evocation of James Gatz of The Great Gatsby, right down to an obsession with the green of the cricket ground he wants to build which seems to exercise the same fascination over him as the green light on the docks did for Gatz. Like Gatz's dreams, Chuck's dreams come to nothing in the end. But if in The Great Gatsby Gatz's move across the USA from the western state of North Dakota to the eastern one of New York is also his journey from a solid moral grounding to immoral crass materialism (and Gatsby's narrator, Nick Carraway's decision to leave New York to head out west a rejection of that same materialism), then what are we to make of Hans and Joseph's move from across the eastern seas to New York and Hans' final decision to move back to England? A reconnection with family and reconciliation and acceptance of his past perhaps? If so the Netherland of the title could be the New York Hans inhabits in his day-to-day life as a stock analyst and which he eventually leaves. There are other interpretations, of course, but one of the hallmarks of an evocative phrase is that it may have multiple meanings. The prose O'Neill uses is wonderfully crafted with wonderful turns of phrase which manage to contain both beauty and ambiguity (I was sometimes reminded of Ishiguro). Some may find that maddening, but I found it wonderful.
    • 4/5
      This title came up time and time again as LibraryThing's #1 recommendation based on the have-read books I entered when I signed up a few weeks ago.It was easy to see how the match came about, but the insistent recommendation raised my hopes so high that ultimately I was a little disappointed. More beautiful turns of phrase that you can shake a cricket bat at, though, and a touching story of a marriage.
    • 4/5
      A good, engaging read with perhaps the narrowest focus-- almost nothing happens, and what does (will) you konw already. At the same time, the unfolding of the relationship between this madly wealthy banker and his cricketing friends-- all New York immigrants, mostly poor and non-white-- is utterly moving. May be considered a bit "male" by some. Also, heavily about cricket.
    • 4/5
      This is a very interesting novel in that it uses the shock and disruption of 9/11 as a backdrop to the disruption in one man's life. But, not the major tragedies of losing loved ones that so many people lived through; instead, this book is about what probably most New Yorkers experienced -- no close family members killed, no major property loss, yet a fundamental shock and change to the life they thought they were living.Hans has moved to New York from London with his wife. After the 9/11 attack, she returns to London with their baby son, making it clear that Hans is not welcome to move with them. Rather, he is to visit every two weeks. So, we find Hans alone in a strange city that is, itself, feeling detached from its foundations. No surprisingly, Hans looks back and has strong memories of his mother and he begins to play cricket as he had done as a boy. This search for some link to his past brings him, in some ways, farther from it. He drifts into the New York cricket scene which is populated by recent African and Caribbean immigrants, notably Chuck Ramkissoon who becomes Hans' friend. Through Chuck, Hans is drawn into Russian culture, illegal gambling and various schemes. Yet, Hans remains somewhat outside of Chuck's world as he remains estranged even from his own life.The book is well written. Hans thoughts often wander, taking us with him. Mr. O'Neill is able to maintain the flow of the writing and the story through these digressions and jumps in time by his excellent writing, including a strong ear for dialogue. Some reviewers say nothing happens in this book. I disagree. Life happens; people touch each other in unexpected ways; and life goes on.
    • 4/5
      It's billed as a novel about cricket. But it isn't really. There are a few other things it isn't (set in aftermath of 9/11, but with only passing reference to that, although one is aware of it). But it is quite an interesting read - it felt like it wasn't going anywhere after 50 or so pages, and none of the characters were particularly likeable. But despite this the book draws you in - and the quality of the writing sustains it.
    • 2/5
      I'm not mad at this book; it's just that I don't feel like it caused my brain to go in any new directions.
      It felt like the author really liked this idea of West Indian and Asian immigrants who get together to play cricket in NYC, so he sort of wrote a novel around it.

      I probably wouldn't have finished it if I hadn't been stuck in a doctor's office with nothing else to read except a two-year-old copy of Game Informer, but since I did, I don't think it was a complete waste of time. It was very well-written and if you like books about Dutch stock analysts whose marriages are in crisis, you might like this one.
    • 4/5
      I bought this book because I teach--and love--"The Great Gatsby" and many reviewers said that O'Neill was the new Fitzgerald. Though the novel was thoughtful and the characters, both well-developed and believable, it's clear O'Neill wasn't out to prove "The rich are different." Van den Broek, his narrator, has a detached Nick-Carraway, 1st-person viewpoint but Chuck Ramkissoon, the novel's Gatsby, is mostly the gangster side of Jay, the side that he denies to himself in pursuit of his idealistic dream of Daisy Buchanan. (Whimsically, Chuck's girlfriend is a very different kind of Daisy, but with the same name.) And Chuck's scrambling in 21st-century New York is also typified by the colour green--this time not the resonant symbolism of Daisy's dock light, to which Gatsby is seen 'praying' early in the novel, or the "orgastic future" Nick ruminates about at the novel's close, but a cricket green that Chuck wants to build overlooking the shoreline of New Jersey. O'Neill sees the outsider in Jay, not the noble knight misplaced nine centuries and stuck in a world in which his lady demands of him, not deeds of daring, but a closetful of bespoke shirts. So 'Chuck', like Jay, anglicized his name, dealt with lowlifes, all to realize the ineffable outsider's dream, but it's ethnic now, not necessarily class-related. His end is determined, but again not idealized. Both men's dreams are dead but Chuck's wasn't nearly so elevated in the first place.A good read--and O'Neill has some of Fitzgerald's poetic gifts of language, although put in service of no brilliant butterflies decorating the rolling lawns of Long Island. Fitzgerald's highly autobiographical novel wasn't intended to be a snapshot of America at the beginning of the highly materialistic 20th century but that's the critical judgment it has received. O'Neill with his 9/11 opening seems to be consciously trying for that snapshot almost a century later; it's difficult to imagine that "Netherland" will be read and studied 90 years into its future, unlike "GG".
    • 5/5
      It took a while for this book to cast its spell, but once it had I found it quite enchanting.The novel is narrated by a Dutch-born market analyst, Hans de Broek, who has spent most of his adult life in England, but who moves with his British wife and young child to New York. The experience of 9/11 politicises his wife, and frustrated by the apparent lack of a similar response in her husband, she separates from him and returns to the UK with their child. Whilst alone in New York, Hans (who was an enthusiastic cricketer in his Netherlands childhood) becomes involved in the local cricket scene, played mostly by first-generation immigrants from the Indian sub-continent and the East & West Indies. Here he first encounters Chuck Ramkissoon, with whom he strikes up a strange friendship. Years later (and this is not to give away the plot, since it is revealed in the opening pages), with Hans having returned to England, he learns that Chuck's corpse has been fished up out of the Hudson river.That is the bare-bones of the plot, but It is hard to describe what the novel exactly is about, as it encompasses so many different subjects and themes in a relatively short space. The 'selling point' in publicity for it has been what it has to say about cricket, but this is a relatively small part of the book - I would say happily a small part, since I am not a fan of cricket, but O'Neill writes so beautifully and compellingly about it that you are able to share the narrator's enthusiasm whilst you are reading.A major theme appears to be loss: both in terms of losing (Hans has lost his wife and son, his father died when he was young and he has suffered the loss of his mother twice, firstly when he left the Netherlands and then again with her death, and underlying everything are the losses of 9/11), and in terms of being lost: Hans is doubly displaced in New York, being an immigrant first from the Netherlands and then from England. His experience as a wealthy immigrant is contrasted with that of his fellow cricketers, and particularly with that of Chuck, but not in a moralistic way; indeed it is quite a feat, given the current climate, that Hans comes across so sympathetically. He is portrayed mostly as an observer of life and his surroundings, who doesn't make judgements and for the main part is happy to drift along, taking things as they come. This is a chief cause of his wife's frustration with him, but also what allows him to pursue his friendship with Chuck, who by contrast is a visionary, someone who always has plans and schemes on the go, some of them disreputable (leading to his eventual downfall) but others magnificent follies, most notably his plan to build a cricket stadium in New York.Chuck's story is reminiscent of that of The Great Gatsby's, and O'Neill shares Fitzgerald's lyrical prose style. Another writer that came to mind when reading the book was W.G. Sebald. Like Sebald, O'Neill's structure is (seemingly at least) very discursive and digressive, with memories nested inside memories, meaning it can be difficult to keep track of events if you are not reading attentively. But this is a book that very much rewards your attention, and I am sure I will be reading it again to draw more from it.
    • 3/5
      I liked it, but wasn't crazy about it. A guy from the Netherlands talking about time he spent in New York and the people he met playing cricket with other immigrants. How his marriage fell apart because of his wife's anxiety after 9-11, and how it came back together again.I've never lived in New York, I wasn't touched much by 9-11, I haven't been an outsider. I have never known immigrants from the West Indies whose culture plays a big part in this book. So I am distant from some of the themes of this book and maybe that's why it didn't move me much.
    • 3/5
      I wish I wasn't, but I'm disappointed. After all the glowing reviews, and winning NYTimes book of the year, I was so looking forward to this read. Perhaps, if my expectations weren't so high, I would have enjoyed it more. As it is, I read it, I enjoyed it moderately, but it just didn't move me.
    • 5/5
      This is an absolutely marvellous novel, beautifully but sparely written and set principally in New York in the months and years following 9/11. The narrator is a Dutchman who had been living in London until his wife, a successful corporate lawyer secures a new post in New York. Displaced from their luxurious home in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Centre they move into the Chelsea Hotel. Unable to adapt to the chaotic life of the hotel and the all-pervading sense of dread in New York the narrator's wife returns to England, taking their young son with her.Meanwhile, the narrator falls into a routine of fortnightly visits to his increasingly distant family in London interspersed with weekends during which he re-awakens his past love of cricket, playing with members of the city's Asian and West Indian communities. Through this cricketing network he becomes acquainted, and then increasingly closely involved with Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian entrepreneur who dreams of utilising cricket as a mechanism for establishing world harmony.What follows is, by turns, a love story, a paean to cricket and a distant study of the fringes of the New York underworld. Spellbinding!
    • 4/5
      A highly atmospheric book primarily about New York - the immigrant experience, its connections with the Netherlands, the aftermath of 9/11, and (staggeringly) the playing of cricket there. Everything about the writing says quality, and there were some brilliantly observed details; I particularly liked the description of the narrator's attempt to get an American driver's license.On the other hand it was an incredibly slow read, weighed down by its important topics and some serious wordiness. The narrator even waxes lyrical about icicles: "I was torn between a ridiculous loathing of this obdurate wintry ectoplasm and an equally ridiculous tenderness stimulated by a solid's battle against the forces of liquefaction". Er, right.My copy has a photo of the author looking mildly fed up on the inside back cover, and at times I think my expression probably mirrored his, as I toiled through page after page of random musings in search of a plot. I salute the superb writing, but on balance prefer his earlier novel 'This Is The Llife'
    • 2/5
      I thought it would be really great, from all the hot press and awards. I found it to be not so exciting. More about a guy and his marriage. I guess I need more thrills than that.
    • 2/5
      I thought it would be really great, from all the hot press and awards. I found it to be not so exciting. More about a guy and his marriage. I guess I need more thrills than that.