| Can I Come Look At These Items? | | This online store is in association with Amazon.com, so these great, high-qualiy products will come from their warehouse or from other partners. Thanks for shopping! |
|
|
|
Netherland: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Joseph O'neill
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
Buy New: $12.00
You Save: $11.95 (50%)
New (39) Used (15) Collectible (6) from $11.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 308
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.2
ISBN: 0307377040
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780307377043
ASIN: 0307377040
Publication Date: May 20, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
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.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 22 more reviews...
 A Story of New York's Immigrant Dreamers and Their Dreams July 8, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Setting a novel in New York City after September 11, 2001 does not automatically make it a 9/11 novel, and Joseph O'Neill's NETHERLAND proves that point despite the nonsensical opening sentence of the book's dust jacket description, "In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11,..." To the contrary, the genius of O'Neill's story arises from its display of the precise opposite, that life in the great city for most resumed its normal struggling course within weeks if not days of the World Trade Center attacks. Indeed, one might well argue that NETHERLAND's message, intended or otherwise, is that the rest of the world has substantially over-inflated the impact of 9/11 on the local citizenry and their lives. Only those least attuned to the city, like Han's wife, carried the ill effects with them in the aftermath.
Hans van den Broek, an oil industry securities analyst, had moved to New York City in 1998 with his Londoner lawyer wife, Rachel; their son Jake was born in New York in 1999. Two months after the family was forced from their Tribeca home into temporary residence at the Chelsea Hotel by the post-9/11 clean-up, Rachel decides she can no longer tolerate her unresolved fears of another terrorist event. She announces her plan to return with Jake to London and, when Hans offers to leave as well, she tells him to stay. "This isn't a question of geography," she explains.
Left to his own devices, Hans is gradually drawn away from the glittering Wall Street banking world into that of the city's bedrock, its outer borough immigrant population. The driving force behind this discovery is a ceaselessly energetic Trinidadian businessman and cricket enthusiast named Chuck Ramkissoon. Chuck is one part dreamer and nine parts operator -- real estate entrepreneur, kosher sushi restaurant owner, weh-weh organizer (you'll have to read the book), and driving force behind the proposed creation of a professional cricket stadium in the area near Brooklyn's long-abandoned Floyd Bennett Field. While his residency at the Chelsea Hotel creates its own opportunities to meet such memorable characters as the angel-winged Turk, Mehmet Taspinar, it is his acquaintance with Chuck that opens Hans's eyes to "the other" New York City. Through Chuck, Hans comes to know Vinay (a Bangalorean newspaper critic of fast food shops), Eliza (Chuck's girlfriend whose profession involves custom-made personal photo albums), Mike Abelsky (Chuck's Moldavian Jewish business partner), and others. O'Neill's characters inhabit the spacious margins of New York City, the netherland seldom talked or written about that supplies the city with much of its energy and richness.
O'Neill's prose is filled with dead-on, occasionally hilarious descriptions of New York, whether it is the Department of Motor Vehicles office at Herald Square or a train ride up the eastern bank of the Hudson River past the Tappan Zee Bridge. His choice of Hans, a Dutchman, as his main character is an inspired one. The Dutch were the first European settlers of what was then New Amsterdam, and Dutch place names still abound in the city and surrounding area. Hans is both an immigrant and, in an historical sense, a returnee to the "new Netherlands" of his ancestors that some view as a never-never land and others characterize as an American netherworld.
The first few pages of the book, set in 2006, make clear that Hans and Rachel are together again in London and that Chuck's body has been found, handcuffed and dead, after floating in the Gowanus Canal for two years. Joseph O'Neill's NETHERLAND, like most true New York stories, is not about the destination but the journey and what one makes of life's opportunities after arriving. Despite Hans's ultimate return to his family in London, O'Neill makes clear that pre- or post-9/11, New York City is uniquely the world's true melting pot and never-never land. As an anonymous banker declares to Hans in the book's opening page, "New York's a very hard place to leave. And once you do leave..." His sentence ends, dangling and unfinished. No better words can be added.
 Cricket in America July 7, 2008
As someone who plays cricket in America, manages a team and even built a pitch on a public park, I was able to in fact relate very much to the main character in the book, although I certainly don't want to end up dead like him for his efforts! Not giving anything away here, the book begins with the murder and builds suspense while winding its way through politics, romance etc...which could be exasperating...enough smut, mon, lets play ball ;-)
Seriously, to us expats in America from cricket loving countries, this book gives a voice. Everything in our lives, seems, has an analogy in the game, but somehow all of that gets buried by the culture of our adopted home. Soon life feels very pseudo, only to be saved when we indulge in the game.
But say what you will about cricket being somewhat underground activity in America and great "back home" wherever it may be, I think it is truly a lot more fun playing here...we get a unique perspective of the world that even the top international cricketers don't get...perhaps for a season or two, when they are at the top of their game, playing away from home, if that. As for pitches, most of us cannot relate to authors lament about "bush cricket" at all...we used to play in sand-pits in India and beaches in the Caribbean...bottom line...for many of us, this is a move up!
I know this is fiction, but I found one episode to be completely unbelievable. The author goes to India, the modern home of the game, and instead of cricket gets wrapped up in some spiritual mumbo jumbo. Whatever...
Best novel I have read in manyyears July 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I loved this book. I lack the patience to read many novels but the greatness of the writing in this book overwhelmed my frustration with fiction, much of which is either too simplistic or too self-conscious.
I didn't see this book, as others have, as a "9/11 in NYC" book. Not even close. It can be read on one level as simply the narrative of a man's thoughts about two important relationships in his life and no more, and in that basic frame, it is gorgeously written, and soars at the end (which to me contrasted favorably with Oscar Wao, the one other excellent novel I read this year, which felt anticlimatic at the end, as if the author had to force an ending because the book had reached a certain point where there was nowhere better to go). In this context, New York City is just a place where most of it happens and the 9/11 references are almost obligatory and the book would have seemed strained had it not made some.
Then, of course there is the level at which it is a meditation on the idea of America in a post-9/11 world and the ironic retelling of the Gatsby story in the form of a hustler from Trinidad, and the analogue between the reconciliation between spouses with different attitudes toward the US and the need for America to reconcile with its best self were imaginative and deeply satisfying approaches to the question of the American identity in the 21st century. In this frame, the 9/11 references are of course there but the issues raised are not "9/11 in NYC" issues as much as they are "Iraq" and "Bush / Cheney Scalia destroying civil liberties" issues which are broad American issues put in play by what happened on 9/11. Such that "9/11" is more like the plot developments in a Chekhov play, or the Macguffin in a Hitchcock movie, than the focal point of the book.
I thought the other reviews of this book were extraordinarily incisive and far better than what one usually sees in this website. I think that in itself testifies implicitly to the excellence of the book. As to whether this book will stand the test of time, who knows, but it is the best novel I have read in several years.
A Dream of the West July 5, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
There is a lot to recommend in Netherland: Joseph O'Neil's elegant and propulsive prose, a magnificent tour of New York past and present, and a peek into the world of cricket. As intoxicating as these pleasures are, it's the narrative they embellish that proves the richest and most provocative element of Netherland. Here's the story in a nutshell: three-member family in crisis + high-rolling Wall Street dad + 9/11 + walk on the wild-side = family denouement. Sound familiar? How about an eerie echo of Don DeLillo's Falling Man? DeLillo isn't the only American author O'Neil finds ways to contact: There is Mark Twain: the relationship of the two main characters Hans and C. Ramkissoon bears a striking resemblance to Huck Finn and Jim, even though Ramkissoon is more like Jay Gatsby than a runaway slave. Then there's the men's club of cricket that resonates deeply with Bernard Malamoud's The Natural. What makes the novel so special is Joseph O'Neil's ability to dig into a long-standing American theme like race or sports through a technique of slipstreamed multiple narratives that complicate and update the vitality of those narratives. There is nothing easy in those updates: no happy ending to Hans and C. Ramkissoon's relationship; the lost-and-found Eden of The Natural transformed into the civilizing outcome of empire. In both the overall similarities and the cracks of difference, O'Neil provides a methodology to expand meaning beyond the words on the page and suggest a space for the reader to do what readers do best: create meaning.
Nowhere is the density or the troubling position of O'Neil's metaphors so deeply etched as in the brilliant final set-piece, which takes place at the London Eye. At first glance, the choice of setting signifies the engineering and architectural triumph of the "New London," but exploring just a bit will reveal the Eye as part of the Millenial year, a celebration of the upcoming third (Christian) millennium. Not to stop there, Hans notes the sunset as "Phoebus...up to his oldest and best tricks." I'm guessing you're starting to see the picture. Unlike the grim detente of a new social order that closes Falling Man, O'Neil provides for a completely plausible happy ending for his family. There is certainly no greater testimonial to the lasting mythos and continuing promise of the West than this scene of familial re-unification across generations. Don't get me wrong. O'Neal isn't pandering for Hollywood here; he's sharing the complicated world of his desire and he's asking you to come clean, to make a decision about the meaning of his book. Either you buy into the very idea of a happy ending and find sustenance in the forces of history and the peculiarly Western idea of progress, or you don't and read Netherland as boosterism for a culture that has wandered onto the dust bin of history without even knowing it. I'm still deciding. (That's a good thing.)
Creating the Center That Holds July 5, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Much of Netherland is about the game of cricket, and it is a credit to the genius of O'Neill's writing that a reader can approach the book knowing nothing about the game, hear the narrator sigh mid-explanation about how tired he is of trying to explain it to everyone and give up the attempt, and finish reading the novel still not know anything much about cricket, but have enjoyed the whole book anyway. In that way, it reminded me a little of Field of Dreams vis a vis baseball. I can see a film that will satisfy popular interest coming out of Netherland as well, but this is a far more important book in terms of where we are as a society right now than Field of Dreams ever tried to be. In Netherland, for the first time post 9/11 I have read a book about the disaster that exploded in New York and shook every corner of the world, and seen not only what we've lost, but also what we've gained.
|
|
|
| |
News 
