The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Love's Death by Oscar van den Boogaard. Trans. Ina Rilke
Jason D. Fichtel

Oscar van den Boogaard. Love’s Death. Trans. Ina Rilke. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 152 pp. $20.00.

Boogaard’s fifth novel (his first to be translated into English) is ultimately about loss: of life, family, love, and self. Spanning roughly fourteen years, Love’s Death chronicles the story of Oda and Paul Klein, whose eight-year-old daughter, Vera, accidently drowns in the neighbors’ pool. In the aftermath of the drowning, Paul leaves his wife to deal with her grief alone, as he takes a military post in Suriname. He returns seven years later to find a wife who has distanced herself from him and others. Soon after his return, the neighbors’ house burns down, and a young girl-the same age as Vera would have been-emerges from the flames. Daisy, a fifteen-year-old from America who was staying with the neighbors, is taken in by Paul and Oda in a desperate attempt to re-create what they lost when Vera died. In the final section of the novel, Emil, a friend of Paul’s and Oda’s secret lover, speaks for the first time to reveal his involvement in both Paul and Oda’s life and in the death of their daughter. Stylistically, Love’s Death is astounding. Boogaard deftly stretches out time through acute attention to every detail, mirroring the attempts of the characters to keep ahold of something in the present. The narrative is told almost entirely in the present tense and at times with such sparseness, such directness, that the sense of loss permeating the text is truly experienced by the reader. In terms of plot, the majority of the book holds together well with a maintained sense of tension and grief. The final section, however, in which Emil speaks, feels almost too contrived (as if we couldn’t guess from the previous sections what had happened) and moves us too far away from where our focus should be-on whether Paul and Oda will ever survive their multiple traumas. For its stylistic merits alone, though, more of Boogaard’s work should find its way into English translation. [Jason D. Fichtel]


Interview with Founder Board of Directors Funders Submission Guidelines Dalkey Archive Full Catalog Current and Forthcoming Titles Recent Titles Review of Contemporary Fiction Special Library Offer Special Backlist Sale Stores & Wholesalers Academics Libraries Reviewers Context Casebooks Author Interviews Links Dalkey Archive News Events Newsletter

The Review of Contemporary Fiction Love's Death by Oscar van den Boogaard. Trans. Ina Rilke Jason D. Fichtel Oscar van den Boogaard. Love’s Death. Trans. Ina Rilke. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 152 pp. $20.00. Boogaard’s fifth novel (his first to be translated into English) is ultimately about loss: of life, family, love, and self. Spanning roughly fourteen years, Love’s Death chronicles the story of Oda and Paul Klein, whose eight-year-old daughter, Vera, accidently drowns in the neighbors’ pool. In the aftermath of the drowning, Paul leaves his wife to deal with her grief alone, as he takes a military post in Suriname. He returns seven years later to find a wife who has distanced herself from him and others. Soon after his return, the neighbors’ house burns down, and a young girl-the same age as Vera would have been-emerges from the flames. Daisy, a fifteen-year-old from America who was staying with the neighbors, is taken in by Paul and Oda in a desperate attempt to re-create what they lost when Vera died. In the final section of the novel, Emil, a friend of Paul’s and Oda’s secret lover, speaks for the first time to reveal his involvement in both Paul and Oda’s life and in the death of their daughter. Stylistically, Love’s Death is astounding. Boogaard deftly stretches out time through acute attention to every detail, mirroring the attempts of the characters to keep ahold of something in the present. The narrative is told almost entirely in the present tense and at times with such sparseness, such directness, that the sense of loss permeating the text is truly experienced by the reader. In terms of plot, the majority of the book holds together well with a maintained sense of tension and grief. The final section, however, in which Emil speaks, feels almost too contrived (as if we couldn’t guess from the previous sections what had happened) and moves us too far away from where our focus should be-on whether Paul and Oda will ever survive their multiple traumas. For its stylistic merits alone, though, more of Boogaard’s work should find its way into English translation. [Jason D. Fichtel]

Search the full text of our books: