About this item
Highlights
- "What's Mine is a surprising and deep work with a persistent quiet momentum carrying the reader back-and-forth in times and spaces across the slivers of four interlocking lives.
- Author(s): Bette Adriaanse
- 324 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Humorous
Description
About the Book
"A self-described "visual" person, Luis has filled his white-carpeted apartment with clean beautiful things: a glass table, a white couch, marble countertops, workout equipment. He can afford to on his meager bagel shop salary thanks to inheriting his mother's city apartment. This is his home--a refuge from a confusing and intimidating world. Professor William Rose is an Oxford intellectual. He's visiting Amsterdam to learn where he came from with the aid of an old letter which may prove Edward Hond, the renowned Dutch philanthropist, is his biological father. Following the letter's address, he finds himself looking up into the lit windows of a small, one-bedroom apartment... only to see Luis. His choice to knock on the door, and Luis's choice to let him in, will unravel each of their pasts, dismantling their lives as fifty square meters of meticulously decorated space becomes a territorial battleground."--Book Synopsis
"What's Mine is a surprising and deep work with a persistent quiet momentum carrying the reader back-and-forth in times and spaces across the slivers of four interlocking lives. It is totally engaging." --Brian Eno, musician, artist, activist
Professor William Rose is an Oxford intellectual. He's visiting Amsterdam to learn where he came from with the aid of an old letter which may prove Edward Hond, the renowned Dutch philanthropist, is his biological father. Following the letter's address, he finds himself looking up into the lit windows of a small, one-bedroom apartment... only to see Luis. His choice to knock on the door, and Luis's choice to let him in, will unravel each of their pasts, dismantling their lives as fifty square meters of meticulously decorated space becomes a territorial battleground.
What's Mine is Bette Adriaanse's humorous and heartbreaking tale of two men who refuse to share. Luis and William's conflicting world views, not to mention living habits, will test the limits of their sanity as well as those around them. A nosy neighbor, a philosophical cleaning lady, a maritime space lawyer, and the old park gardener will all begin to seek the answer to one critical question: Can what's mine be yours too?
Review Quotes
"Full of accessibility, lightness and humor... Are you on Luis' side or William's side? Adriaanse leaves the answer almost entirely to the reader. A special book." --Hebban
"Surprising." --Nederlands Dagblad
"The shifting perspectives give this surprising, absurdist novel a cinematic character, but what stays with you is the way small events find their place in the larger story." --Tzum
"With subtlety and humor What's Mine addresses how confusing justice and property can be..." --Argos
"Bette Adriaanse is becoming a major literary novelist in the best European tradition. She has the down-and-out life experiences of the early Orwell, the desperate humor of Flann O'Brien, the prose immediacy of Beckett, and the avalanche of bureaucracy of Kafka. What's Mine is a stellar achievement of depicting the absurdist brutality of contemporary urban capitalism where nothing but narcissism and arbitrary outcomes rule." --Alan N Shapiro, science fiction theorist
"Bette's inimitable voice is always a treat to escape into. I cannot wait for this dark, absurdist tale to go out into the world." --Jing-Jing Lee author of How We Disappeared, selected for the British Royal Big Jubilee Read
"Bette Adriaanse is my favourite Dutch writer. No one writes like she does. Her voice-- frank, whimsical, philosophical, funny, gorgeously tactless-- points a lens at the world that sharpens everything, then she plays with the focus, then resharpens it so the world never looks quite the same. What's Mine is a timeless book that deserves a wide readership." --Caoilinn Hughes, author of Orchid & the Wasp, winner of the Collyer Bristow Prize, Dalker Literary Award, the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award 2021 and the O. Henry award