‘Were you surprised by the success of Beeldrijm?’
Otto Vallei had barely been in Sheffield for two hours when Elleke Bestevaer, head of the Germanic Studies department at the University of Sheffield, asked him this question. They were in West Street, where the staff of the University of Sheffield had rented an apartment for him for two weeks, and Otto was sitting with Elleke in a virtually dead Indian restaurant where two waiters, each in a corner of the room, were staring into an imaginary and infinite distance. It was lunchtime, but people in Sheffield obviously didn’t do Indian lunches. Elleke Bestevaer had asked her question carefully, almost guardedly, from which Otto had concluded that the success of Beeldrijm had in any case been a surprise to her.
It wasn’t the first time he had been asked this question. He must have heard it maybe about two hundred times in the last year, from the mouths of TV reporters, chairs of panels, in-depth interviewers, fellow writers, organizers, freelancers, interns and moderators in libraries, theatres and classrooms. But family members, neighbours, Facebook friends, dissertation writers and book sellers also wanted to know whether he had been surprised by his success, not to mention the far-flung friends who, after the publication and the steadily increasing sales figures of Beeldrijm, suddenly appeared to be not so far-flung after all and who, in various ways, had tried to restore their now lukewarm contact. Oh well, that’s what friends are for.
His most recently published novel had indeed met with rave reviews. The book sales had reached figures that Otto had until now associated with authors inhabiting another parallel universe, where events were driven by the media and literary managers. And nothing succeeds like success. This much had now become clear to him. He had accrued nominations for literary prizes; film producers were fighting for the option on Beeldrijm; foreign publishers were offering almost surreal amounts as an advance on the translation rights. Otto, whose previous experience had qualified him in the bar room wisdom ‘trouble always comes in threes’, had consequently been able to experience that prosperity, recognition and triumph could well up, swell and overflow, to the point of blindness and suffocation.
And evidently this success was causing such general surprise that hordes of surprised onlookers, in tones of surprise, had also tried to detect this in him, Otto, as if they expected that he himself, in the midst of this mass surprise, should be more surprised than everyone else, preferably teetering on the top rung of the comparative ladder, and then in the tongue-twisting and incorrect version: the surprisedest, he, Otto Vallei, a drowning man washed up on the uninhabited island of Surprisia; he who, until recently, had been an anonymous plodder and creator of the unread literary gem such as Oud zeer (Past Hurts) and Bastion van onschuld (Bastion of Innocence), the novels preceding Beeldrijm (Picture Rhyme) published in unfathomable silence. These novels had, in a pair of old slippers, shuffled of their own accord towards bargain basements and unsold copies, every one of them reaching its final destination of second hand book shop, car boot and the internet, where, after each book by the author Vallei, Marketplace advertisements displayed on their virtual patch the abbreviation AOC, serving as the final kick in the teeth for the author concerned.
The generally unsurprised among us would of course not be familiar with this abbreviation. All Offers Considered. Anyone who had seen this abbreviation on the internet in the close vicinity of their very own personal brainchild had stopped being surprised by anything a long time ago.
So no, Otto did not want to answer Elleke’s question by saying he had been surprised by the success of Beeldrijm. He had used up his supply of surprise long ago. He could hardly say, in answer to this question, that he had been surprised by the absence of readers for his previous novels because achieving success at this late stage, success for someone who, according to the current age criteria for writers, was already semi or almost completely ‘elderly’, was no cause for heroics and arrogance, genuine or otherwise. In the end, after he had been asked this dozens of times, Otto Vallei was most particularly surprised by his talent for being able to think up a way of answering using a slightly different wording every time.
What was it like in reality? Success had made him gasp for breath. Success had thrown his life into confusion. Success had overtaken him, overwhelmed him, overcome him, whatever you want to call it. Success had also somehow shattered and torn him. So, as an appendage to the coat tails of all these fine words could also be added the word ‘surprise’. But affirm this out loud – no.
‘Finished?’, asked one of the waiters in the still dead restaurant. The man had wrenched himself away from the infinite distance somewhere outside the four walls of the restaurant and did not wait for an answer as he cleared their plates from the table.
Otto decided to give Elleke Bestevaer an answer that was partly true. ‘What surprises me the most is that other people are so surprised’.
He wanted to leave it at that but Elleke Bestevaer had obviously interpreted his answer as a veiled reproach. As the waiter pressed the dessert menu into her hands, Elleke began to hold forth over all the hype in the land of publishing, beginning writers who seemed to get younger and younger, the increasingly high turnover of books, the gradual disappearance of critics and the rise of the cheery columnist.
Her analysis was both factual and expertly to the point, but it was slightly alienating to hear all this being announced in, of all places, Sheffield. You would have thought that Elleke Bestevaer had other things on her mind in the north of England than a robust examination of the Dutch literary industry. But she spoke enthusiastically, which made up for a lot, if not everything.
And speaking of surprise: Elleke was one of those people, Otto had discovered soon after arriving in Sheffield, for whom everything was infinitely amazing, those who never seemed to get bored and for whom everything was, against all odds, fantastically interesting.
Well that was just great, Otto decided, and he resolved that for the duration of his stay in Sheffield he would silently enjoy Elleke’s talent for cheerful amazement.
And he could make a start on this silent enjoyment that very afternoon. Shortly after lunch Elleke introduced him to a group of seven second-year students in the University of Sheffield’s Gallup building. She did this perched on the edge of her chair, one leg folded in a yoga-type position whereby her right foot appeared to be supporting her left thigh. This, thought Otto, was how breathless teenage girls sometimes sat, but it did not look out of place for the head of Germanic Studies, particularly because the pronounced informality of the yoga fold contrasted with the way in which the seven students – who were indeed all girls (boys generally still run a mile at the mere mention of studying a foreign language) – were sitting on their chairs; straight-backed and hardly moving. The seven girls did not look as if they felt very comfortable. Otto did not find this strange; there was after all an interloper in the seminar group, and they were expected to ask the interloper questions, which they appeared to find quite a tall order.
The subject was ‘Dutch literature in a multicultural society’. Otto had not chosen this subject, but he tried to make the best of it and rattled off some key phrases from other people’s work. After the hour-long seminar – it was a miracle he had been able to talk for the whole hour – Elleke praised the group and then he himself, after which the seven students, all short-legged and wide in the hips, stomped out of the classroom. Elleke screwed up her fists energetically, made a slight victory gesture and said, ‘That was a fantastic experience for the girls, it really was’.
Otto Vallei was no match for such good humour and refreshing cheerfulness. And maybe what he had just said was actually meaningful and accurate. Ever since his success, he had become incapable of properly judging even the smallest of his activities. Elleke suggested that they finish off the fantastic experience with a glass of white wine and, for the second time that day, they walked across West Street. They passed the Indian restaurant and Otto realized that, for the coming two weeks, Sheffield, which was after all home to hundreds of thousands of people, would take on the appearance of a village. This discovery started to lull him into a gentle slumber, a fact that hopefully remained imperceptible to his companion who was, by this time, rubbing her hands in glee.
Elleke’s enthusiasm on this first afternoon was to set the tone for his stay in Sheffield. It was as if this enthusiasm was colouring the immediate campus surroundings. Sheffield had two universities, Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Sheffield, with a total of more than thirty thousand students. Within the University of Sheffield, the sub-subcategory Dutch Studies was a pin prick within another pin prick, and this complete insignificance felt like protection – although, at the beginning of these two weeks, against what exactly Otto was not sure. Against everything, presumably. Against the rumblings of city life. Against the appearance of the University of Sheffield’s high-rise landscape, the cluster of faculties, alternating between high-rise blocks that seemed to be built from walls of rain-resistant glass and Eastern-bloc style concrete brick rectangles, overgrown with a moss-green layer of callous that no high-pressure jet would ever be able to remove. Protection and clarity conjured up the daydream that he was still in Buitenveldert. Sheffield and Buitenveldert mixed and merged perfectly with one another.
Every day Otto trudged the five-minute route from his apartment to the Gallup building. There he was expected to fill two lecture hours. Each time he encountered no more than seven or eight students in the classroom, and then not even always in varying combinations. Their main occupation during his time as guest writer-in-residence was the translation of several chapters from Beeldrijm. These chapters had been chosen by Elleke after a thorough consultation with her colleague, Robert Wagtman, a small man with short dark hair which lay flat to his head but ended up in a trendy quiff that stood straight up, to the point of being obscene. Elleke and Robert took it in turns to provide their teaching services. That week he repeated at least five times, with what he considered on occasion the patience of a saint, all manner of details about Beeldrijm for various groups, after which the students could ask their questions to do with the hidden pitfalls of its translation.
Just as in London, Cambridge and Nottingham, at whose universities Otto had, before Sheffield, worked his way through the same lesson schedule for the same diminutive number of students, most of the questions were remarkably concrete and to the point, which came as a relief to him. How do you translate the word ‘kunstpaus’ (‘art pope’)? What is a ‘pijpenla’ (‘pipe drawer’)? Can you put a full stop in English where there is a comma in Dutch? How do you translate the word ‘bakfiets’ (‘box bike’)? For Otto, these questions were like music to his ears. To his surprise – now he actually was surprised – these kinds of questions made him happy. Like a craftsman equipped with a language toolkit, he could start work on piecing together a new text. A relief after all the blah blah with journalists and TV presenters pretending to want to know everything about his novel Beeldrijm, but who had seldom actually even read the book.
Beeldrijm was the story of a shady art restorer, employed in a museum of contemporary art, who is expert and cunning enough to steal a number of unbelievably expensive masterpieces from the collection and who subsequently finds himself trading these masterpieces in all kinds of equally shady countries on the periphery of Europe at prices far below the market value but which still make him a fortune. He is then subsequently robbed of this fortune by a young artist who proves himself even more expert and cunning and manages to gain the restorer’s confidence by mounting a highly effective charm offensive.
These professions were not exactly glamorous ones and the subject of contemporary art was not generally something that would cause a stampede of readers to stand to attention. But Beeldrijm ended in death and murder because even Otto, from the depths of his bunker in Buitenveldert, had realized that these days the mere mention of ‘literary thriller’ meant that even the most incompetent halfwit could make a grand entrance. Half petulantly, half chuckling to himself, he had at the time added a few criminal twists to the plot of Beeldrijm. Besides, the title did not describe this ‘murder mystery’ factor in his novel, but had to do with a number of well-executed forgeries of the art works the restorer had stolen. Not that this explanation of the title was of any interest to the reader whatsoever, as he had already discovered after a handful of lectures for various reading clubs in the country, these library lectures being about the least spectacular consequence of Beeldrijm’s tour of triumph. He was also to find himself again on the stages of large theatres where literary festivals were taking place. He was a guest on talk shows. He was, no word of a lie, transported by helicopter to a castle on the outskirts of the Veluwe forest for an event bringing together six nominees for a literary prize, surrounded by TV cameras. He was given VIP tickets for theatre performances. He received invitations to important openings and festivities. He received fan mail. He received hate mail. And, perhaps most amazingly, given the stay-at-home hermit that he was, he received requests from all sorts of places abroad for public appearances, lectures, seminars and festivals. Against his better judgment, in the first instance he had jubilantly accepted a number of these requests until, even after a few months, he began to show signs of exhaustion. This was no surprise because, in the words of his wife Karin, he was and remained a sensitive soul.
The sensitive soul wrested very little joy from the transformation in his life as a writer. While he was often asked the question about being surprised by complete strangers, it was his intimate circle (and this was only three people: Karin, his publisher and his editor) who asked him more than once, ‘Why don’t you just enjoy the success?’
While he did know the answer to this question, he was careful not to say it out loud. Perhaps the intimate circle knew the answer themselves too. He didn’t have chance to enjoy anything because he was too busy being indignant.
Not satisfied with a nomination for Beeldrijm, he was indignant at the quality of the creations of the other nominees – and also at the fact that it just had to be the parvenu among the nominees that went away with the prize. Neither was he happy with the crowds at his appearance during a literary festival, but irritated at the charming little faces in the audience and the poor organization. And far from being happy that his book was soon to be translated, he was worried about the quality of these translations. And he wasn’t pleased with – and so on, and so on. In rare moments of humility, Otto was really quite startled at the fact that he had obviously already been completely spoilt even before acquiring the status on which this spoiltness was based.
The result of this was that Karin, who, in the long, long years before his literary breakthrough, had been blessed with a never-ending supply of patience and unshakable solidarity, recoiled from him at a horrifying speed. Not that she immediately left or demanded that he do so but, instead, she shut herself off from these new-found airs of stardom displayed by her previously so cruelly misunderstood favourite author and proceeded to hide away deep within herself. While, outside the house, the artistic recognition was dealt out in spades, it was as if at home all that remained of Karin was a fading afterimage.
What should he do about it? What could he do about it? Should he go and personally retrieve the ten thousand copies from people’s homes, so that she could have back her old, anonymous, bad-selling slogger, a complete unknown within the world of literary criticism? He thought her downlike defence – the kind of down that felt more like steel – was a massive overreaction. After all the years of being disregarded and unappreciated, surely he was allowed a bit of prima donna behaviour. Besides, all well-known writers worth their salt were prima donnas, spoilt arseholes outdoing each other in the character weakness and bigotry stakes. A likeable successful author – that really was a contradictio in terminis. Otto Vallei lamented the fact that his very own wife could not see that it was simply his duty, as a celebrity author, to feel that life had wronged him. He was just getting in on the act, and that was how she should see it.
But she didn’t see it that way. And when he received a request to become a guest writer for six weeks in four British university towns, and was also on the point of rebuffing this request via a short email, Karin said with an urgency he had not heard from her before, ‘I really think you should go and do that’. Otto understood. Any contradiction would not be appreciated. And when he had abandoned any idea of contradicting her, a small shard of Karin’s old personality immediately returned, as she added, ‘You probably won’t want to hear this from me, but it will do you good.’
And so it was that he, Otto Vallei, the notorious non-traveller, the stay-at-home hermit and self-confessed opponent of any form of affected or unaffected cosmopolitanism – so it was that Otto landed in London, going afterwards to Cambridge and Nottingham, and ending up in the place where this guest authorship had been initiated: Sheffield, with Elleke Bestevaer as the driving force.
For the most part, Otto was oblivious to the two-week stay in London, given that he spent the whole of these two weeks desperately trying to escape the literary acclaim that hung over him like a cloud of vapour – without anyone in London actually noticing it, although Otto did not pay any attention to this minor detail.
In a special part of a special corridor of a special floor of a special section of a special annex of UCL, Otto encountered a handful of academics from Germanic Studies, and from that moment he developed a fascination with the very micro scale of this discipline of study – as if minuteness was synonymous with worth and fragility. This minuteness suited him, he discovered. The fragile radar of a university Moloch was right for a sensitive soul, especially if the effort and passion with which those concerned, teachers and academic staff, carried out their profession seemed to be greater than the space they took up in the city-within-the-city, the University College London, with a population of tens of thousands of students and, at least so it seemed, as many teaching staff.
In the midst of all these people, a few dozen students occupied themselves with a language called Dutch. The miniscule nature of this number in comparison to the total student population immediately mellowed Otto, not only towards the Dutch section and the students themselves but – without needing to be too precise – in one fell swoop towards the whole academic way of life and, if he was honest, towards humanity in general. As long as there was still room for the insignificants, all was not lost. Besides, he was one of them, one of the insignificants.
So in a certain sense, there in London Otto had come home, although he wouldn’t really have put it quite like that himself. But after the two weeks, ‘home’ moved with him to Cambridge, where two ladies in their late fifties headed up a Dutch section of 12 students and where the insignificants were thus even more insignificant, which was also the case for the Dutch department of Germanic Studies in Nottingham, housed in an impressive late nineteenth century whitewashed building. Just the kind of place you imagined when you thought of British university life, including rolling grassy fields, students sauntering across shade-dappled footpaths and enormous study halls with high windows and walls full of books that appeared to have not been removed from the shelves in decades.
In Nottingham the Dutch section had two rooms for the lecturers and, here too, the fact that the language in which he spoke and wrote appeared to find itself a subject on the periphery of academic life had a wonderful, if not healing, influence. Otto healed from the knocks and wounds and cuts resulting from the recent injustice he had encountered as if it were a gruesome and feared illness.
However, it was really Sheffield that put a plaster on these knocks and wounds and cuts, with Elleke Bestevaer as the unsuspecting ‘Day and Night Nurse’. Would the energetic Head of Department realize that this vessel of a best-selling author, broken by success, had found a safe haven in her faculty? Otto had the impression that no one there at all had the slightest idea of his inner turmoil. He took the example of Elleke’s resounding good humour and immersed himself every day for one or two lecture hours in the activities with the equally unsuspecting students. To them, he was an anonymous writer who happened to have written a novel from which they were expected to translate several chapters. No more, and no less.
Initially he had related broad and sweeping stories about the world behind Beeldrijm; about the restoration and conservation of ancient and modern art, about the degree of difficulty involved in forging old masters such as – and he deliberately named English examples – J.M.W. Turner and John Constable to the key British figures of the twentieth century, in particular Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon. He also spoke about the specific locations in the novel, the museum world he had sketched, but also the sort of countries that his central character, the insidious restorer, visited: Croatia, Slovenia and Poland – art forgery just seemed to flourish more in and around the Balkans than in Western Europe. His audience of seven to eight students took note of his stories without asking much, but Elleke provided him with a brief reality check when, after his lecture hour, she carefully said to him, ‘Perhaps next time you should just ask the students if the names Turner or Bacon mean anything to them. And, just as an example, if they know where Slovenia is.’
At this suggestion, all at once the abyss of apparent ignorance of ‘his’ students opened up before him. He had named countries and artists that he had really assumed to be well known but when, during a subsequent seminar, he asked with some hesitation who knew Turner’s work, there was no reaction. And, yes, Slovenia and Croatia also represented a terra incognita. During yet another seminar, it appeared that none of the students had ever visited the Tate Britain and the Tate Modern. Neither had they ever heard of Francis Bacon. This was, euphemistically expressed, a surprise to Otto. Because they had chosen an obscure subject like Germanic Studies, he had automatically assumed that the students had arrived at this choice after making a long, adventurous journey through the various domains of European culture – or something like that.
So, during one of their lunches, there was a great temptation to present Elleke with a report on the decline of education, the infantilization of the current generation of students and worldwide dumbing down in general. But Elleke was – and again, this did not come as a surprise, averse to cultural pessimism and did not take part in litanies about the level of knowledge of her students.
‘I’ve heard too many colleagues complaining too often about how thick and stupid the current generation is. I see it differently. Not one of my students is thick. They just don’t know as much. That is a crucial difference.’
And she left it at that. In his mind’s eye, Otto silently took his hat off to her. Here spoke someone dedicated, driven, an idealist aid worker, not an academic who viewed all her colleagues merely as dead wood in comparison to developing her own specializations and academic research; no, Elleke Bestevaer embodied the old social-democratic educational ideal of upward mobility and emancipation – and if he didn’t watch out, Otto noted, he would float away on the spot on wings of impassioned inspiration, ignited by Elleke. This inspiration was necessary to discover the beauty of the kind of life where, as it was here in the Gallup building, the one individual taught the other without causing the slightest ripple within Sheffield’s wider environment. At the same time, Otto realized that the truth could not ever be found in any kind of epicentre because it was precisely the individual, located at the periphery, who embodied this highly sought after truth.
In the Netherlands he had appeared with other writers before audiences of as many as 800 people. Some writers enjoyed this. Others took these audience numbers completely for granted – they had never known their audiences anywhere to be anything but large ones.
That Otto had to get used to these numbers was an understatement. The same went for the sales figures for Beeldrijm, the numbers that attended literary events, the many nominations for prizes and the even greater number of reviews of his novel.
It wasn’t a question of getting used to it, but a question of self-alienation. As soon as an intended audience took on, even in the farthest distance, the dimensions of a crowd, it felt as if his soul was seeping out of him or something.
But Sheffield gave him back the life he had before his success – and so it was as if he had come home in this city where he had never been. Yes, it was the easiest thing in the world to put Sheffield and Buitenveldert together in his imagination. In fact, Sheffield had rendered him ‘roadworthy’ to restart his Buitenveldert existence. In Buitenveldert he had walked one fixed route – and so he kept to the one route in Sheffield as well. Consequently, he saw nothing of the city. In Buitenveldert he always shopped in the one branch of the same supermarket – and so, in Sheffield, every day he went exclusively to the one branch of Tesco’s, open until twelve midnight. Once he deviated from his route and visited the city centre, with the City Library on Surrey Street where, in the main reading room, the spirit of the nineteen seventies seemed to rise like vapour from the dark brown panelling. On one of the upper floors was the museum of ancient and modern art, the Graves Gallery, a series of medium-sized decrepit rooms which he shuffled through on his lonely ownsome, occasionally bumping into a warden who looked like a character from a popular comedy film from, once again, the nineteen seventies. One of those where museum wardens are supposed to be slumped on a pathetic little folding chair snoring. In the museum shop he bought two old postcards with sculptures by Henry Moore on them for ten pence. The sales assistant had to find the barcodes on the postcards, which he couldn’t seem to manage at all, so that in the end it was a full ten minutes before the assistant was able to charge him the miniscule amount. Otto decided to find this quaint.
All in all, he made his life as small and meaningless as possible and the smaller the smallness and the more meaningless the meaninglessness in Sheffield became, a warm tingling feeling of happiness grew within him. This life style enabled him to make his highly personal contribution to the poetic-heroic ideal of inhabiting the space where one ‘lives completely’. Others seemed to effortlessly inhabit this whole space in total solitude in the pursuit of such completeness. But there were those too who encountered a maximum completeness on the outer edge of this space. He was one of them. As soon as he had the slightest inkling that people were turning their attention to him, he expanded to colossal proportions. The centre of attention represented the kiss of death; the distant margins were where you found the serum.
Without anyone noticing anything of his transformation, after two weeks Otto left the city as if reborn, his departure accompanied by Elleke, who waved him off like a young girl at Sheffield’s pristine station. Otto was shocked to find that he was not looking forward to returning to Buitenveldert. Sheffield and Buitenveldert may well have merged into one in his imagination, but the question was whether the real Buitenveldert was prepared to bend to meet this merging. On the other hand, Otto was hoping fervently for a minor miracle. Perhaps the success of Beeldrijm had eroded and disappeared during his weeks in England. Perhaps the book didn’t exist anymore. Perhaps Beeldrijm now only existed in Sheffield, where the students pored over Dutch words and searched for their English equivalents. Perhaps he would take all the blessings of the periphery with him and perhaps – and this last consideration made Otto feel that a romantic mist was unfurling around his authorship – during his absence Karin had in fact been ignited by the same holy fire as that of Elleke Bestevaer. The latter required the power of thought and imagination of course. If he was capable of equating Sheffield with Buitenveldert, he could perhaps also equate his wife with Elleke. Such an idea sounded presumptuous, but he meant it in a profoundly innocent way; perhaps the success of Beeldrijm had blinded him to the naked truth that, for as many years as he could remember, Karin had demonstrated the same good humour and refreshing attitude as that of Elleke Bestevaer. All in all, on leaving Sheffield, Otto felt more pious than the pope and he also noticed that this piety was extremely pleasing to him. Suddenly he felt a passionate yearning at the thought of seeing Karin again. He could not wait to present himself to her as a man reborn. This was perhaps childish but sometimes childishness didn’t make you cringe as much as you might expect.
Having reconciled with himself, after these two weeks Otto left the city. In the plane it was as if an omnipotent hand was lifting him high above the clouds. There, in an aisle seat on row 11, what all those people had been asking him suddenly came to him; without any further thought of indignation or feelings of envy and resentment, he felt surprise at the success of Beeldrijm. This must be how people felt when they had spent some time at a health resort. At Schiphol the KLM aircraft made a soft landing. As he was leaving the plane, two stewardesses were standing on duty at the exit, saying goodbye to every passenger. Between all the bye byes, one of them said to Otto, ‘Mr Vallei, I read your Beeldrijm. I thought it was so lovely.’ After which the poor girl began to blush profusely and turned awkwardly to another passenger. Otto knew that before he would have reacted to this with displeasure. Lovely, lovely – how is it lovely? This adjective was misplaced. Beeldrijm was first and foremost surely indispensible, disturbing, complex, finely-tuned, well-conceived – and only then maybe just a little, somewhere around position number 27, lovely.
But on leaving the aircraft, he felt refreshed by this compliment hastily whispered to him and, once in the arrival hall, it suddenly occurred to him that the stewardess must have been instructed by Elleke Bestevaer. Although he realized that this thought was absurd, on another, higher level, a level where the true reality of things appeared to him, there was nothing absurd about this assumption. What was more, there was a good chance that Elleke Bestevaer, with an omnipotence he would never be able to understand, had instructed everyone in the Netherlands in everything, so that Otto could return home unscathed. Yes, he was sure of it: thanks to Elleke, the Netherlands had been administered a serum. Finally he was back on safe ground again.
Translated from Dutch by Suzie Holdsworth
Suzie Holdsworth completed her undergraduate studies in Modern Languages in the UK. She then spent ten years living and working in the Netherlands, gaining experience translating a variety of text genres, including the literary, from Dutch into English. Since then she has been awarded an MA in Translation Studies (2009) by the University of Sheffield and is currently studying for a PhD, also at the University of Sheffield.
