Netherland

Netherland
Paperback Cover
Author	Joseph O'Neill
Language	English
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Harper Perennial
Publication date	January 5, 2009
Media type	Print
Pages	340 pp
ISBN	978-0007275700
OCLC Number	263294099
Preceded by	The Breezes

This is about the novel. For the country, see Netherlands

Netherland (2008) is a critically acclaimed novel by Joseph O'Neill. It concerns the life of a Dutchman living in New York in the wake of the September 11 attacks who takes up cricket and starts playing at the Staten Island Cricket Club^[1].

Plot summary

The narrator, Hans van den Broek, a Dutch stockbroker moves from London to New York with his wife Rachael and young son Jake in 1998. The couple intend to stay for a year or two but Hans spends far longer in New York as he becomes estranged from his wife who moves back to London with Jake. Alone in the city Hans turns to his childhood game of cricket and plays with a team of marginalized immigrants including Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian entrepreneur. Hans befriends Chuck and accompanies him on trips around New York. After almost a decade in the city Hans is reunited with Rachael and returns to London discovering a few years later that Chuck died in suspicious circumstances after he left.

Reviews

Netherland was published in May 2008 and was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review where Dwight Garner (NYTBR senior editor) called it "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".^[2] It would later that year make the prestigious New York Times Book Review list of "10 Best Books of 2008" as chosen by the paper's editors.^[3]

James Wood, writing in the New Yorker, called it "one of the most remarkable postcolonial books I have ever read"; and said it has been "consistently misread as a 9/11 novel, which stints what is most remarkable about it: that it is a postcolonial re-writing of The Great Gatsby.^[4]. Several other reviewers commented on the similarities with The Great Gatsby.

Awards and nominations

In the weeks leading up the announcement of the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Netherland was spoken of by some literary pundits as being the favorite to win.^[5] However, on September 9, 2008, the Booker nominee shortlist was announced and the novel, surprisingly at least for some critics at the New York Times, failed to make the list.^[6] The book was also nominated for the Warwick Prize for Writing (2008/9) and made it to the long list of that prize announced in November 2008.

Netherland won the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Translations

The punning title is untranslatable into Dutch, and the Dutch translation takes the title Laagland ("Lowland") rather than the more literal but ambiguous Nederland.

Notes

External links

• Two Paths for the Novel, Zadie Smith review of Netherland from The New York Review of Books
• Bacon, Katie (May 6 2008). "The Great Irish-Dutch-American Novel". The Atlantic. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200805u/joseph-oneill.  (Interview with Joseph O'Neill)
• BBC interview with Barack Obama praising the novel.
• Netherland: 1st Obama Book Club Selection - A review of Obama's taste in reading.