Netherland [sound recording] / Joseph O'Neill.
Record details
- ISBN: 9781436155458
- ISBN: 1436155452
- ISBN: 9781436155427
- ISBN: 1436155428
- Physical Description: 8 sound discs (8.75 hours) : digital ; 4 3/4 in.
- Publisher: Prince Frederick, MD : Recorded Books, 2008.
Content descriptions
General Note: | In container (17 cm.). Title from container. "Unabridged Fiction" -- Container. "With tracks every 3 minutes for easy book marking" -- Container. Compact disc. |
Participant or Performer Note: | Narrated by Jefferson Mays. |
Summary, etc.: | Strangely enough, the outpouring of good will that followed the terrorist attacks on New York City produced a kind of elation in many people. It is this giddy sense of starting over, thinks Hans van den Broek, that prompted his wife to leave him. Drifting in the sudden expanse and uncertainty of his life, Hans is drawn to enigmatic Trinidadian Chuck Ramkissoon and the curious appeal of the city's immigrant cricket leagues. |
Search for related items by subject
Subject: | Immigrants > Fiction. New York (N.Y.) > Fiction. |
Available copies
- 0 of 1 copy available at Bibliomation.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 1 total copy.
Other Formats and Editions
Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Status | Due Date |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Milford Public Library | O'NEILL (Text) | 34013076493363 | Adult Fiction CD | In transit | - |
Electronic resources
New York Times Review
Netherland
New York Times
October 27, 2009
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company
There have been good novels about living in the post-9/11 world (Ian McEwan's "Saturday"), pretentious ones (Don DeLillo's "Falling Man") and sentimental ones (Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"). But sorting through the pile of so-called 9/11 novels is a sad exercise, one that grows more pointless by the day. They're all 9/11 novels now. It's impossible, though, to stop scanning the horizon for something else - the bracing, wide-screen, many-angled novel that will leave a larger, more definitive intellectual and moral footprint on the new age of terror. Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland" is not that novel. It's too urbane, too smallboned, too savvy to carry much Dreiserian sweep and swagger. But here's what "Netherland" surely is: the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell. On a micro level, it's about a couple and their young son living in Lower Manhattan when the planes hit, and about the event's rippling emotional aftermath in their lives. On a macro level, it's about nearly everything: family, politics, identity. I devoured it in three thirsty gulps, gulps that satisfied a craving I didn't know I had. O'NEILL, who was born in Ireland, raised in Holland and now lives in New York, seems incapable of composing a boring sentence or thinking an uninteresting thought, whether he's writing about dating ("We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically") or the darker stuff that keeps us awake at night, like the nuclear plant just up the river ("Indian Point: the earliest, most incurable apprehensions stirred in its very name"). O'Neill's prose glows with what Alfred Kazin called "the marginal suggestiveness which in a great writer always indicates those unspoken reserves, that silent assessment of life, that can be heard below and beyond the slow marshaling of thought." And O'Neill knows how to deploy the quotidian fripperies of our laptop culture to devastating fictional effect. There's a moment in "Netherland" involving a father, the son who has been taken from him, and Google Earth that's among the most moving set pieces I've read in a recent novel. The father hovers over his son's house nightly, "flying on Google's satellite function," lingering over his child's dormer window and blue inflated swimming pool, searching the "depthless" pixels for anything, from thousands of miles away, he can cling to. O'Neill's novel is full of moments like this: closely observed, emotionally racking, un-self-consciously in touch with how we live now. The plot in "Netherland" runs on two tracks. The first tells the story of a family. The narrator, Hans van den Broek, is a Dutch-born equities analyst (he compares himself, in terms of influence if not infamy, to Henry Blodget) who lives in a TriBeCa loft with his British-born wife, Rachel, and their son. When 9/11 forces them to flee farther uptown, they end up living, almost by accident, in the shabby-glamorous Chelsea Hotel, and it is there that their marriage slowly cracks apart. Rachel wants to take their son back to London and her family. He'll be safer there, far from George Bush and the United States, a country she has begun to think of as "ideologically diseased." Hans, unsure of his feelings, starts to believe he is "a political-ethical idiot." O'Neill writes beautifully about what it sometimes felt like in the months after 9/11, when you couldn't attend a dinner party unless you were intellectually armed for hours of bitter debate: "For those under the age of 45 it seemed that world events had finally contrived a meaningful test of their capacity for conscientious political thought. Many of my acquaintances, I realized, had passed the last decade or two in a state of intellectual and psychic yearning for such a moment - or, if they hadn't, were able to quickly assemble an expert arguer's arsenal of thrusts and statistics and ripostes and gambits and examples and salient facts and rhetorical maneuvers. I, however, was almost completely caught out." What Hans and Rachel are trying to avoid, he tells us, is "what might be termed a historic mistake. We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the '30s or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the cold war inhabitants of New York, London, Washington and, for that matter, Moscow." It doesn't matter. Rachel and their son are soon gone, while Hans stays behind in New York. The book's second story line, and perhaps its more resonant one, is about the solace Hans finds in the vibrant subculture of cricket in New York, where he is among the few white men to be found on the hundreds of largely West Indian teams in the city, teams that fan out, in the hazy summertime, across scrabby, lesser-known public parks. O'Neill seems to know all there is to know about this sport. He writes about it with casual grace, describing, for example, the cricket batsman's array of potential strokes: "the glance, the hook, the cut, the sweep, the cover drive, the pull and all those other offspring of technique conceived to send the cricket ball rolling and rolling, as if by magic, to the far-off edge of the playing field." The cricket these men play is, they realize, not quite the game they fell in love with back in the Antilles. The New York fields are too small, and not well tended. Here is more of O'Neill's lovely writing about the game: "This degenerate version of the sport - bush cricket, as Chuck more than once dismissed it - inflicts an injury that is aesthetic as much as anything: the American adaptation is devoid of the beauty of cricket played on a lawn of appropriate dimensions, where the white-clad ring of infielders, swanning figures on the vast oval, again and again converge in unison toward the batsman and again and again scatter back to their starting points, a repetition of pulmonary rhythm, as if the field breathed through its luminous visitors." O'Neill cracks open a teeming world on the fringes of Manhattan, and through it we witness the aspirations of countless men who otherwise are invisible to wealthy Manhattanites. ("You want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country?" one character asks. "Put on the white clothes of the cricketer. Put on white to feel black.") Hans's guide through this alternative city is Chuck Ramkissoon, a talky, street-smart Trinidadian who is alive in ways Hans is not Some of Chuck's business practices are shady (he runs an old-world "weh weh" gambling ring and intimidates his rivals), but he's a Gatsby-like American dreamer as-well, a man who hopes to build a world-class cricket arena in Brooklyn. Chuck wants to make a killing on his cricket center, but he also has bigger ambitions: he essentially wants to save the world. "All people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they're playing cricket," he explains. "What's 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 say, we want to have something in common with Hindus and Muslims? Chuck Ramkissoon is going to make it happen. With the New York Cricket Club, we could start a whole new chapter in U.S. history. Why not?" Some of the best parts of "Netherland" are Chuck's rambling political and cultural monologues, delivered as Hans drives him around the boroughs. (Ostensibly, Chuck is helping Hans prepare for his driving test. Unwittingly, Hans is Chuck's chauffeur, shuttling him to some of his least tasteful business dealings.) The book's few lesser moments occur at the Chelsea Hotel, where a cast of eccentrics - including a man who wears angel's wings and a wedding dress - are asked to carry cheap metaphorical freight. Chuck's vast cricket plans don't pan out, and he vanishes under murky and ultimately grisly circumstances. Did he kill himself? one friend asks. Another responds: "You idiot! Chuck isn't a suicide guy! This guy has more life inside him than 10 people!" "Netherland" is a bit like the wily and ebullient Chuck Ramkissoon. It has more life inside it than 10 very good novels. 'All people,' one of O'Neill's characters insists, 'are at their most civilized when they're playing cricket.' Dwight Garner is senior editor of the Book Review.
BookList Review
Netherland
Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
In this novel set in post-9/11 New York City, Dutch banker Hans has been abandoned by his wife and son, who have decamped to London. Defeated by his seemingly failed marriage, Hans takes up residence at the Chelsea Hotel and entertains his childhood love of cricket by joining a league made up of West Indian New Yorkers. Here he meets Chuck, a charismatic Trinidadian entrepreneur who introduces him to the outer reaches of New York's boroughs and marginal cultures, while creating a friendship with Hans that is both perplexing and satisfying. O'Neill's poignant and tragic vision of New York is paired beautifully with the protagonist's reflection on his past failures and moments of happiness. Through the author's outsider vision of the city, New York's particular blend of cultural oddities and multifarious inhabitants are brought to the surface, revealing something touching and distinct about contemporary life. Netherland is a powerful merger of seen and unseen struggles, the unraveling of an American dream, and one man's rebirth through it all.--Paulson, Heather Copyright 2008 Booklist
Publishers Weekly Review
Netherland
Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Tony award-winner Jefferson Mays (I Am My Own Wife) follows the lead of author O'Neill for his reading of the lauded novel about Dutchman Hans van der Broek and the unusual bond he forms with fellow cricket buff and New York dreamer extraordinaire Chuck Ramkissoon. O'Neill's crisp, layered narrative and interest in the less-traveled byways of Brooklyn are reflected in Mays's understated take on Hans's narration (interestingly, he does not attempt a Dutch accent); Chuck's light, fruity Caribbean accent; and the denser accent of Chuck's wife. Mays is nothing if not a talented performer, and while there may be less than meets the eye to O'Neill's celebrated work, Mays's reading is a joy. A Pantheon hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 3). (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Library Journal Review
Netherland
Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
What does it take for Dutch banker Hans to feel at home in post-9/11 New York? A bunch of cricket fanatics. With a four-city tour; reading group guide. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Netherland
Kirkus Reviews
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Novelist and memoirist O'Neill (Blood-Dark Track: A Family History, 2001, etc.), born in Ireland and raised in Holland, goes for broke in this challenging novel set largely in post-9/11 New York City. Dutch banker Hans, who narrates the story from the perspective of 2006, and his British wife Rachel, a lawyer, get more than they bargain for when they transfer their jobs from London to Manhattan for an American experience. After the World Trade Center bombing, they move out of their Tribeca loft into the Hotel Chelsea, and soon Rachel decamps with their baby son back to London. Hans visits regularly but the marriage flounders. Distraught and lonely, he joins a Cricket league made up mostly of Asian and Caribbean immigrants. Soon he (along with the reader) falls under the sway of Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian umpire. Chuck is a charming entrepreneur who has opened a kosher sushi restaurant; an inspiringly patriotic immigrant with plans to save America with Cricket; and a petty gangster running a numbers game. A classic charismatic rogue, Chuck leads Hans on a "Heart of Darkness" tour of New York's immigrant underbelly. As Hans begins to realize that Chuck might be a dangerous friend to have, Hans and Rachel's marriage disintegrates. At Chuck's recommendation, Hans moves back to England to win her back. Throughout, O'Neill plays with the nature of time and memory: Hans's Dutch childhood with his single mother, for example, still haunts him in New York. The shifting truths of who Chuck has been, who Hans's mother was, who Hans and Rachel are to each other, depend on what O'Neill calls "temporal undercurrents." This love story about a friendship, a place and a marriage is not easy to read, but it's even harder to stop thinking about. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.