A claustrophobic family drama centred around the tumbledown home — in an anarchic, peripheral community poised on the edge of the modern world — of the widowed artist Job and his crippled daughter Maria, his housekeeper and only model for many years. All sorts of generation-bending tensions come out into the open when Job brings his new and very young girlfriend Felicity into the mix, whilst Maria's son and daughter-in-law (Cas and Xandra!) are busy having a designer baby.

There's a lot of symbolism going on, some heavy biblical references and apocalyptic weather, and a lot of fierce criticism of our (modern?) drive to control our own bodies and environments as well as the male possession and control of women's bodies.

Dorrestein explains in an endnote that Job's painting in the story is based on Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World" (1948, in the MOMA collection), but the characters are her own. ( )

Casper en Xandra Olson laten niets aan het toeval over. Hun eerste kind zal een jongetje zijn, dat heeft de genderkliniek gegarandeerd. Daarna een meisje, zo is hun plan, en dan nieuwe borsten voor Xandra en voor de kids een blonde labrador. Ook de norse schilder Job Olson, Caspers beroemde grootvader, is heer en meester over zijn lijf en leden en zijn lot, totdat hij kort na zijn huwelijk met de veertig jaar jongere Felicity wordt getroffen door een beschamende kwaal. Dit boekenweekgeschenk uit 1997 is grappig, met name wanneer er een pomp voor de waterput wordt aangelegd, en wat er gebeurt als Maria, Job's kreupele dochter en model, zegt: "Het regent weer". ( )

beetje te ambitieus ( )

I find this a sad story. In that sadness and depressing it is very impressive, though.
Mary, Job, Cas and the others in this story are captured in their lives. Maria is phisically not perfect, her mother died when she was 9 years old, her father was a tyrant, her son has several shortcomings. In the entire book the characters are aiming for their own gain and advantage, wanting to impose their own ambitions on the other(s) they have relations to.
Ultimately that is not possible for any of them. When getting to the end of the story, the reader finfds, that the end is really just a new beginning, a circle of life that has made ​​a full round and now has arrived at the starting point for the characters in that book (which have become older, but little else changed). Their whole life they've been wanting to escape what is, only to find in the end that i will be done all over again. ( )