- Hardcover: 272 pages
- Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (May 20 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0307377040
- ISBN-13: 978-0307377043
- Product Dimensions: 15 x 2.7 x 23.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 454 g
- Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #114,469 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Hans van den Broek, the Dutch-born narrator of O'Neill's dense, intelligent novel, observes of his friend, Chuck Ramkissoon, a self-mythologizing entrepreneur-gangster, that he never quite believed that people would sooner not have their understanding of the world blown up, even by Chuck Ramkissoon. The image of one's understanding of the world being blown up is poignant—this is Hans's fate after 9/11. He and wife Rachel abandon their downtown loft, and, soon, Rachel leaves him behind at their temporary residence, the Chelsea Hotel, taking their son, Jake, back to London. Hans, an equities analyst, is at loose ends without Rachel, and in the two years he remains Rachel-less in New York City, he gets swept up by Chuck, a Trinidadian expatriate Hans meets at a cricket match. Chuck's dream is to build a cricket stadium in Brooklyn; in the meantime, he operates as a factotum for a Russian gangster. The unlikely (and doomed from the novel's outset) friendship rises and falls in tandem with Hans's marriage, which falls and then, gradually, rises again. O'Neill (This Is the Life) offers an outsider's view of New York bursting with wisdom, authenticity and a sobering jolt of realism. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
Advance Praise for Netherland
"New York is not what most people imagine it to be. Just as marriage, family, friendship and manhood are not. Netherland is suspenseful, artful, psychologically pitch-perfect, and a wonderful read. But more than any of that, it's revelatory. Joseph O'Neill has managed to paint the most famous city in the world, and the most familiar concept in the world (love) in an entirely new way."
--Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated
"A dense, intelligent novel... O'Neill offers an outsider's view of New York bursting with wisdom, authenticity, and a sobering jolt of realism."
--Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
"O'Neill writes a prose of Banvillean grace and beauty, shimmering with truthfulness, as poised as it is unsettling. He is a master of the long sentence, of the half-missed moment, of the strange archaeology of the troubled marriage. Many have tried to write a great American novel. Joseph O'Neill has succeeded."
--Joseph O'Connor, author of Star of the Sea
"Somewhere between the towns of Saul Bellow and Ian McEwan, O'Neill has pitched his miraculous tent. Netherland is a novel about provisionality, marginality; its registers are many, one of the most potent being its extremely grown-up nostalgia. The dominant sense is of aftermath, things flying off under the impulse of an unwanted explosion, and the human voice calling everything back."
--Sebastian Barry, author of A Long Long Way
"New York is not what most people imagine it to be. Just as marriage, family, friendship and manhood are not. Netherland is suspenseful, artful, psychologically pitch-perfect, and a wonderful read. But more than any of that, it's revelatory. Joseph O'Neill has managed to paint the most famous city in the world, and the most familiar concept in the world (love) in an entirely new way."
--Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated
"A dense, intelligent novel... O'Neill offers an outsider's view of New York bursting with wisdom, authenticity, and a sobering jolt of realism."
--Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
"O'Neill writes a prose of Banvillean grace and beauty, shimmering with truthfulness, as poised as it is unsettling. He is a master of the long sentence, of the half-missed moment, of the strange archaeology of the troubled marriage. Many have tried to write a great American novel. Joseph O'Neill has succeeded."
--Joseph O'Connor, author of Star of the Sea
"Somewhere between the towns of Saul Bellow and Ian McEwan, O'Neill has pitched his miraculous tent. Netherland is a novel about provisionality, marginality; its registers are many, one of the most potent being its extremely grown-up nostalgia. The dominant sense is of aftermath, things flying off under the impulse of an unwanted explosion, and the human voice calling everything back."
--Sebastian Barry, author of A Long Long Way
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Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
A significant work,
By
This review is from: Netherland: A Novel (Hardcover)
A significant work about an emotionally bleak post-9/11 that is at once invigorating and reflective. The great tragedy of that day is a shadow that falls over the characters and the events, but it wisely never takes over the novel. This is a reasonably suspenseful, well-paced book,even with some rather long-winded explanations of cricket, which I found myself skimming after a while. (O'Neill, is the author of an acclaimed memoir and a member of the Staten Island Cricket Club, and like a reviewer from the Guardian I couldn't help but wonder occasionally if he shouldn't have written a memoir-essay on New York cricket.) The writing is slightly self-aware at times, and some of the undeniably lovely lyric passages don't feel completely credible to the 1st person narrator. Still, many of the psychological aspects are piercingly sharp and the writing is both honest and subtle, although the main character, Hans, is ultimately less interesting, and more thinly-drawn than the novel's foil, Chuck, a Trinidadian self-made (and highly shady) business man who, we learn early on, has been murdered. Quibbles aside, O'Neill is a great observer of the human condition, and his descriptions of the occupants of the Chelsea Hotel alone are worth the effort.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
good writing,
By Emmaursula (Small town BC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Netherland: A Novel (Hardcover)
This is an interesting story, of New York City, cricket, and the new and old 'immigrants' who love to play the game. Excellent writing, well worth reading.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
The most boring book of 2008,
By Pip "ppsm1" (Abbotsford, British Columbia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Netherland: A Novel (Hardcover)
this was one of the most diappointing books of 2008. I had little sympathy for any of the characters and kept waiting for something to happen. I kept reading and reading and reading and waiting for something to happen. I read some more. I read the overlong over explanatory descriptions of cricket with the same achingly painful patience of watching paint dry on a hot summer day. I kept hoping one of the characters would get on with it. any one of them. i have read several post 9/11 books and this has none of the soulfulness of Zero nor even the straight forward story telling of Falling Man. It would make a great episode on Seinfeld because basically the novel is about nothing. the second star was for the cover (hardcover).
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