Lotte’s husband is a cancer survivor. Like many cancer survivors, the experience has altered him and to celebrate his survival, he decides to walk a pilgrimage: the Camino de Santiago, which runs from Le-Puy-en-Velay in central France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. He sets off in good spirits, but then out of the blue Lotte receives word that her husband has taken his own life on the trail. A year later, to mourn him but also to discover what has happened, Lotte follows his footsteps. Soon, odd things begin to happen, and Lotte discovers that her husband may not have been who he said he was.
This book was a major hit in my home country. The thing is: we, the Dutch, are good at a couple of things. Speed skating. Infrastructure. Water management. We are not good at writing. I mean in general; it’s not like no book worth reading has ever come out of the lowlands, there are a number of good books written by Dutch authors that are fine (Lucas Rijneveld, for one, and I’m quite fond of Thomas Olde Heuvelt). And yes, it’s not like other countries don’t produce their fair share of duds. A lot of people are very fond of this book, so I might be unduly harsh (an English degree is such a buzzkill when it comes to reading), but most of the time all I could think when I was reading this is the unrealised potential.
Lotte’s husband Emil grew up in Bosnia and had a relatively peaceful childhood. At the time of the war, he was serving his military conscription. Lotte is aware of the fact that there is residual trauma, that her husband suffers from PTSD, that he witnessed things that give him nightmares. Whenever she tries to talk to him about it, though, he rebuffs her, and she never presses him. His death comes as a surprise to her, and for all I know it would have been – Emil wouldn’t be the first person to suffer in silence for years before ending it all, much to the surprise of his loved ones – but my problem is that Lotte is dumber than a bag of hammers.
Not about her husband – she, too, wouldn’t be the first to stick her head into the sand when it comes to her partner’s past, nor would she be the first to discover that the person she married might have had a more checkered past than she’d imagined – but about everything that happens around her. People spy on her. Try to run her over. Lotte changes rooms with an injured woman; the woman is found dead in her bed the next morning. The pastry meant for her that a clumsy waitress spills is eaten by a dog; the dog dies. Lotte all shrugs it off with a casual “weird, poor dog, anyway let’s go” or chalks it up to France being France, as if it’s practically on par with the Congo.
All of that would be fine if the author acknowledged it – dumb people do exist – but instead, we enter the second issue I had with this book: in spite of any evidence to her alluring nature, everyone constantly fawns over Lotte. Men fall in love with her, she is their everything, which is a remarkable achievement for a woman so devoid of personality. We never see Lotte do or say anything that appears worthy of the degree of admiration her presence invokes.
And it’s a shame, because there are good stories at the heart of this novel, from the loose fraternity of people who walk the Camino together to the story of three friends torn apart by the ancient social mores that defined the war in Bosnia of the 90s. Going by the bibliography, the book was meticulously researched, but it’s got surprisingly little to show for it.
Ultimately, it feels like a wasted opportunity.
