mooie melancholie! ( )

Sixty-something composer Pierre is heading down the autoroute to Avignon with the severely-handicapped teenager Sonny, whom he's abducted from the care-home where he lives. His quixotic mission seems to be to mark Sonny's 16th birthday by taking him to the top of a hill in Provence to tell him the story of his origins, tied up with the location and with the unhappy love-story of Pierre and Sonny's mother.

There's no real evidence that Sonny is in any way able to understand or respond to what he's being told, so the novella is very much a reflective monologue by Pierre, switching from time to time between first and third person. He takes apart the history of his own dysfunctional private life whilst idolising that of Sonny's mother, and we start to see how the love and empathy that he failed to express properly in earlier relationships is now all being projected, clumsily, onto the surrogate infant Sonny.

An uncomfortable story in lots of ways, but you could call it a kind of Belgian/Provençal Of mice and men, perhaps... ( )

Geweldig geschreven! ( )

Een beginnende zestiger ontvoert een verstandelijk gehandicapte jongen van vijftien naar de Provence, om hem te vertellen over de liefdesrelatie die hij met zijn moeder had.

Een prachtig, diepgevoelig verhaal die thema's als trouw, kinderwens en onbaatzuchtige liefde raakt. Ook het Vlaamse taalgebruik van Verhulst vind ik mooi. In tegenstelling tot andere besprekers, vind ik het einde van het boek juist passend. ( )