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19 maart 2010

Interview with Hilary Mantel: Thorough Unbeliever

Peter Breedveld

weg13U

I am not in any sense on an antireligious crusade. I don’t have very much personal faith, but on the other hand I can understand that one lives as if one believes.

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13 maart 2010

Hilary Mantel Interview: Guardian Angel

Peter Breedveld

weg17U

Vorig jaar kreeg mijn favoriete levende schrijver Hilary Mantel de Booker Prize voor haar historische roman Wolf Hall. Vlak daarvoor was het me eindelijk gelukt een interview, dat ik anderhalf jaar eerder met haar had gehad, aan Vrij Nederland te slijten. Hieronder het eerste deel van de transcriptie daarvan, over de paranormale dimensie van het schrijven.

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8 september 2009

‘I wouldn’t want to sound insane’

Peter Breedveld

yoshiyuki9U

Writer Hilary Mantel is virtually unknown in The Netherlands, but in the UK she is considered one of the most important contemporary writers. Her new novel Wolf Hall has now been shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize. About time she was properly introduced.

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20 maart 2009

Bifi

David Swatling

merkley1U (65k image)

Moroccan-Dutch journalist Hassnae Bouazza is no stranger to controversy. Her work attracts attention for her frank approach to taboo subjects such as pornography in the Arab world.

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28 januari 2006

‘I am not normal on the inside’

Peter Breedveld

Burnsatomiclove (67k image)

Recently Charles Burns’ deeply disturbing but also utterly touching and darkly poetic graphic novel Black Hole hit the shelves of the finer bookstores near you. Never, in any novel, poem or song, have I seen teenage angst captured so well as in Black Hole. The book, in my humble opinion, deserves a place among the great classics of American Literature. I spoke to Burns a while ago, when he was still working on the last pages of his masterpiece.

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2 juli 2005

Naked girls

Peter Breedveld

Bing-xin2 (78k image)

I discovered this new website, one of the most fascinating sites I ever came across. It’s called I shot myself . It’s a site with naked girls. I know, there are naked girls aplenty on the internet. But this site is different. The girls are not professional models, or porn stars, or Eastern European or Philippine unmarried mothers desperately trying to make ends meet.

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26 maart 2005

The cradle of Dutch pop music

Peter Breedveld

FNTielman3 (212k image)
The Tielman Brothers

Why was The Hague the capital of Dutch pop music in the sixties? Probably due to a combination of Indo-Europeans, preachers and typically Haguean bluffers.

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5 maart 2005

Travels Around My Bookshelf 5

Jonathan Howells

naaktbiddenklein (26k image)

For some reason, otherwise perfectly sensible writers like John Irving don’t rate Wolfe. They’re wrong, and, given Irving’s poor form of late, would be best advised to keep their opinions to themselves.

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26 februari 2005

Travels Around My Bookshelf 4

Jonathan Howells

The news that Hunter S Thompson (Dr, if you like, though I never really saw the point of that store-bought title – it did him no favours) has killed himself arrived like a shock but has settled on me as being sadly inevitable. Thompson was a man with little patience for any sort of weakness, and watching his body corrode beneath his eyes (if they held out long enough to see) can’t have been an attractive proposition.

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18 februari 2005

Pride and prejudice in the Netherlands Indies

Peter Breedveld

Dongen (20k image)

Six years ago Rampokan: Java was published, the first part of Peter van Dongen’s graphic novel set in the Netherlands Indies, now known as Indonesia. The story takes place at the eve of the so-called Police Actions (a euphemism for the full-blown colonial war between the Dutch and Indonesian nationalists that took place in 1947 and 1948) and with it Van Dongens solid reputation as a serious graphic novelist was established. Recently the second and last part at long last appeared: Rampokan: Celebes.

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12 februari 2005

You have to be careful

Peter Breedveld

sacco (14k image)

Joe Sacco is a journalist who writes his stories in the form of comic strips. He went to Palestine in the early nineties to report about the Gaza Strip, which resulted in the book Palestine. Later he went to Bosnia where he visited a Muslim enclave in Serbian territory, described in Safe Area Gorazde. Last summer The Fixer (translated in Dutch as De Fikser) appeared, about Sacco’s dealings with a shady Bosnian ex-soldier called Neven.

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