Julia

Dutch poet, author and publisher Otto De Kat’s short new novel is an elegiac study of life spent in the shadow of lost love and failure. The translation is seamless and the prose, while relatively sparse, carries a kind of sharpened poetic finish.

The novel opens with the protagonist found dead from an overdose and winds slowly back into his past, unpicking the knotted reasons behind his lonely end.  Superficially, the book reads like a mystery but although the methods and outcome of the opening death are clear from the outset, the motivations behind it are only gradually unearthed.

From here, the narrative skips elegantly between a strongly evoked past and a poignant depiction of the protagonist’s last few wandering hours. As a young man abroad in pre-war Germany, he falls in love with an elusive young resistance fighter but history forces them apart. As the years pass by, he finds himself unable to escape her memory and his life slowly descends into a blighted struggle. This is an affecting read and though short and tightly focused, De Kat writes with a keen sense of the wider questions battering at the edges of his narrative, waiting to be let in.