Since Roberto Saviano published his book Gomorrah and incurred the hatred of the Italian mafia, he has been living in hiding. What that is like, the graphic novel I'm still alive shows and feels razor-sharp. Roberto Saviano is 12 when he witnesses at first hand the murder of a man in his neighbourhood by the mafia. Fifteen years later,...
Why is the largest retrospective on Italian designer Gianni Versace yet on show in Groningen? "Why not?" jokes Andreas Blühm, general director of the Groninger Museum. Indeed, it seems like a bizarre choice, but if you look a little closer, you will discover a few commonalities between the museum in the down-to-earth north and the maximalism of Gianni Versace, who on 2...
Grieving well for the loss of a loved one does not lead to Prozac or a shrink. On the contrary, a little life skill helps, as in 'Grief is the thing with feathers' by Max Porter, Jacob Derwig and Erik Whien. Once, after tragedy struck my family, I used to console myself by reading aloud the picture book Frog and the Little Bird by Max...
'See Naples and then die' were Goethe's famous words. If the German philosopher was as surrounded by beauty as I was during the new exhibition Dying in Beauty - The World of Pompeii and Herculaneum, I can understand his statement. For the Drents Museum, it is a peculiar choice: an exhibition on an already much-discussed period and society....
Before, when I used to write about theatre for a national morning paper, my travel schedule was partly determined by the reach the paper had in a particular region. So, if I necessarily wanted to write about a theatre performance in Enschede, about Enschedean states, my chief's question was: how many subscribers do we have in Twente? So usually it didn't get there
For Melle Daamen I cherish sympathy. And for a long time: from the time he visited me as a young VPRO director on his round of people from the world of culture. He came to ask for advice: how could he enter the sector? Because a job in culture was his ambition. So many years later, he passed me in the proceedings
Marietje d'Hane Scheltema, her name be praised. How corny I used to think she was, with her neat rhymes with which she managed to transform classical Greek and Roman drinking bouts into Kralings-judged bake sale parties. And how wrong I could be. Because how well her translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses works in the hands of the people at Alum. Yesterday was the premiere...
A trombone screeching like an elephant, violins like imploring songbirds and an oboe rippling a scale like a stream: so opens A Skin of Sound, a performance featuring winds, string instruments, percussion, a South African poet and a pop singer. With bated breath, dozens of visitors in the Great Hall of the Bossche Verkadefabriek listened to the premiere of this shimmering piece....
Not everyone thinks music is also something to look at. Not a crazy idea, considering that some music is so layered and complex that you need all your attention for listening. So modern electronic music largely takes place in the dark, I experienced during two evenings of FAQ Festival in Den Bosch. There, I discovered that I...
Squeezing village society and family, escape with harsh deflowering, student pleasures crushed by bloody abortion, inescapable marriage and childbearing, scorching relationships with men, fierce longing with loneliness, and finally resignation with grandchild; against the backdrop of war, reconstruction, stifled revolution, years of hope and finally in prosperity and cynicism extinguished idealism. Time flows through Annie, Annie flows through the...
Patronisation! Woke terror! These were some of the reactions from the film world when there were calls for the appointment of an intimacy coordinator at Dutch film productions. As if anyone could allow or display sexually transgressive behaviour in a studio with 40 other staff around it. Impossible! Yesterday, the book Wat de Fak! by award-winning actress Maryam Hassouni was published and in it, it states...
Light is the name of the latest production by NUT, a theatre company with close ties to Utrecht's Leidsche Rijn district. It is theatre in a bubble in Utrecht's largest city park, and it starts with good food and drink. I went to see it, and again became even more of a fan than I already was. A few reasons, why that came about.
Jeroen Spitzenberger lets New Rotterdam Jazz Orchestra shine So typically Rotterdam is this performance, just right, because of the space the lauded actor grants to a rather unknown 11-member male orchestra. For weeks, we happily watch Spitzenberger as Tim in the excellent TV series Oogappels, just as we intensely enjoyed The Year of Fortuyn at the same NPO in which he (also)...
The circus performance EZ pulls you out of your comfort zone and raises uncomfortable questions like: what do we agree to without knowing it, and: what do you do when someone on stage voluntarily tortures and manipulates themselves? In their performance, the non-binary Elena Zanzu, a graduate of Montreal's National Circus School and master in philosophy at the University in...
There he sits, at the top, enjoying the view. Camiel Corneille has just conquered his own work, a hellish instrument made of a four-by-four wooden plate that can turn in all directions except the right one. A moving balance beam that can also give you a big whack. Camiel Corneille designed it himself and tackles the thing...
Paradais - 'paradise' - is the cynical title of Fernanda Melchor's new, disconcerting novel. The world the Mexican writer conjures up is more like hell. Polo, a dark-skinned 16-year-old boy living with his mother in a small Mexican village, has rather fucked up his life so far. He has been kicked out of school, smokes and...
A sensitive novel about being allowed to be yourself, that is Arthur Japin's new book What silence wants. He tells the tragic life story of Anna Witsen, whose career as a singer was broken in bud. Who remembers them, the nineteenth-century writers and artists who became known as the Tachtigers? Poets like Willem Kloos, Albert Verwey, Frederik van Eeden,...
We die too late. Most of the time. After all, nobody wants to spend the last years of life leaking in a nursing home, cared for by ever-changing staff who do their stinking best but are incapable of the love that children, or close friends for want of it, could give. Better a pill than dementia, we say, but then you have to say 'Yes!
Gianfranco Calligarich's second novel translated into Dutch is as impressive as his well-received previous one. In the embrace of the river is a thrilling story that grips the main characters and the reader until the last page. Only two years ago, the first Dutch translation of one of the novels by...
In his new novel When I Come Back, Italian writer Marco Balzano reveals a hidden world: that of female migrants hired by prosperous Westerners to care for their demented elderly, children and household. In Eastern Europe, there is a word for the burnout affecting millions of Eastern European domestic and care workers: 'the Italian disease'. Migration is often portrayed as...
Argentine writer Aurora Venturini was 85 when she received the Premio Nueva Novela for The Cousins, which she had submitted anonymously. She finally got the recognition she craved, with this eccentric, fascinating story with equally eccentric and fascinating characters. In The Cousins, Yuna tells of her monstrous family of 'misfits'. Yuna herself is retarded and her younger...
One might, when visiting the Venice Arte Biennale 2022, immediately shout 'woke' or 'wokism'. It's not that difficult, since the curator's choices emphasise female and non-Western artists.1 But I would find that too easy and ultimately unjustified. When you try to look fresh - forgetting all the reflections beforehand - it falls...
Fourteen years after the death of her Jewish mother, presenter Dieuwertje Blok found her war diary. With her debut Dragging Lightness, Blok pays a warm tribute to the woman who gave her life. A profession in the spotlight - Dieuwertje Blok is no stranger to it. Her grandmother Saartje, who as the daughter of fishmongers grew up in the Joden Houttuinen...
In Brengschuld, Jan Siebelink returns to his familiar Sievez family, adding a new chapter to the story of the downfall of their nursery. Ever since his biggest success novel Knielen op een bed violen, writer Jan Siebelink has regularly returned to his characters Hans and Margje Sievez, their son Ruben, and especially to their nursery in Velp. Also...
Mountains and Molehills is the name of the exhibition EYE has dedicated to Fiona Tan. A video artist who often works with archive footage. From EYE's image bank came the raw material for Footsteps: a personal document and also a look back at the Netherlands as we rarely see it.
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