- Paperback: 300 pages
- Publisher: Harper Perennial (1 Sep 2008)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0007302967
- ISBN-13: 978-0007302963
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (131 customer reviews)
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Review
'Netherland is so expertly woven that it is impossible for a reader not to admire what it essentially is - a beautifully written exploration of memory and self.' Sunday Telegraph
'The wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Centre fell. I devoured it in three thirsty gulps, gulps that satisfied a craving I didn't know I had. O'Neill seems incapable of composing a boring sentence or thinking an uninteresting thought.' New York Times
'O'Neill writes about cricket with an insider's knowledge and a metaphorical sweep. The result is the first great American novel underpinned by a deep understanding of the complexity of spin bowling. A novel full of vividly descriptive passages that possess a heightened, almost hallucinatory, brilliance. A great American novel with an ordinary European everyman at its centre.' Observer
'Elegant and profound' Sunday Times
'Extraordinary. O'Neill is a writer of dizzying elegance.' FT
'It is hard to know which is stranger - that a great American novel has been written about cricket, or that a great cricket novel should be set in America. But both are true. Netherland is ambitious, intelligent and deeply perceptive.' The Times
'New York is not what most people imagine it to be. Just as marriage, family, friendship and manhood are not. “Netherland” is suspensful, 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
‘O'Neill writes a prose of Banvillean grace and beauty, shimmering with truthfulness, as poised as it unsettling. As well, this is a story that is hard to put down, for its characters are so real and their preoccupations so urgently of the now, that the book has the vividness of breaking news. He is a master of the long sentence, of the half-missed moment, of the strange archeology of the troubled marriage. Many have tried to write a great American novel. Joseph O'Neill has succeeded.’ Joseph O’Connor
'Somewhere between the towns of Saul Bellow and Ian McEwan, O'Neill has pitched his miraculous tent … The reader, almost imperceptibly, becomes little by little scorched by the novel's brilliance, irradiated by it, benignly." Sebastian Barry
Observer Sports
'Great cricket novels can be counted on one hand...Netherland looks as if it may top the lot!'
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The narrator is all-important in this wonderful book. He's a Dutchman adrift in New York when his wife decides to return to her English parents with their small son, Jake. Hans is an analyst in oil and gas conglomerates and his job is just too lucrative to relinquish, and so he opts to stay, returning to England at fortnightly intervals to spend a weekend with his little son. Shortly after his wife, Rachel, leaves he happens upon a group of immigrants playing cricket, such a bizarre apparition that it prompts him to join them, and there he meets Chuck Ramkissoon, a West Indian naturalised American, who is a fabulist and some-time entrepreneur, who later turns out to have darker sidelines that Hans only gradually discovers.
If you, like me, don't care for, or even understand the game of cricket, don't fear that you'll be embroiled in endless descriptions of the thwack of leather on willow, this novel is not about cricket in that way. Cricket is a mechanism to explore the city of New York with its ability to create the diaspora of almost everywhere else. What captivates is the voice of Hans describing his life, his love for his wife, Rachel and his child, and the gift of friendship with Chuck, who has endless stories to tell, as well as fantasies to dream about.
Wry, gentle, sensuous and sensitive, Hans battles to understand himself, his wife and the city of New York and we learn much about the history of the city and its inhabitants in this stunningly intimate and moving narrative. This is an absorbing and captivating read, one of the most memorably pleasurable books I've come across this year.
If you, like me, don't care for, or even understand the game of cricket, don't fear that you'll be embroiled in endless descriptions of the thwack of leather on willow, this novel is not about cricket in that way. Cricket is a mechanism to explore the city of New York with its ability to create the diaspora of almost everywhere else. What captivates is the voice of Hans describing his life, his love for his wife, Rachel and his child, and the gift of friendship with Chuck, who has endless stories to tell, as well as fantasies to dream about.
Wry, gentle, sensuous and sensitive, Hans battles to understand himself, his wife and the city of New York and we learn much about the history of the city and its inhabitants in this stunningly intimate and moving narrative. This is an absorbing and captivating read, one of the most memorably pleasurable books I've come across this year.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Really can't think of a fault. An intriguing plot, with thoughts and ideas slipping backwards and forwards over time and place. There are all manner of components - evocations of childhood, the unpicking of relationships, visually memorable scenes and images, and humour slipped in between sorrow and angst, to name but a few. I had to admit feeling relieved to read later that it took the author 7 years to write this - it tells in the glittering prose.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Sold as a tale of a man whose wife leaves him to go back to England after the tragedy of 9/11 and then decides building a cricket pitch is what New York really needs alongside the unusual Chuck I thought that it sounded quite different. Especially with the twist that Chuck is pulled out of a New York canal hands tied behind his back and having been dead for quite some time I thought there might be some added mystery.
What the book turns out to be is more a description of New York after 9/11 and looks at the people living there and how they cope. It also looks at what affect this has one the marriage of our narrator Hans van den Broek and his wife Rachel who cannot cope in the aftermath and such atrocities, this was for me the most interesting story in the book. It isn't Hans who has the plan to make a cricket pitch it is in fact Chuck a character with darkness who doesn't seem to be all he appears. A great unreliable character though, he sadly isn't in the book as much as I would have liked as I found him quite entertaining. The rest of the story evolves around what happens in the years between Rachel leaving and Hans hearing that Chuck is dead.
I didn't really gel with this book at all. I started of liking it however the marital strife of a life changed by chaos and horror in New York is done and dusted within fifty pages or so. Then what follows is a succession of characters and incidents that flow through Hans depressing years after of which all bar Chuck and cricket come and go with no real relevance or point. This seems like a very long winded essay of the writer's thoughts on America and the cultural societies in New York after 9/11 which drifts off at tangents that I couldn't follow. I just didn't care what happened to them again bar Chuck, I wont say the ending but I was left confused and slightly non-plussed and all in all quite nonchalant.
For me, though I know many people have absolutely loved this book, I ended up feeling quite disappointed and I wasn't that excited about the book anyway. I didn't feel I knew enough about Hans to want to follow his story and could actually see why his wife left him, though technically she was leaving the city. I did give the book a fair chance and I did finish it when at some points I didn't want to, so I gave it my all I just don't think it was quite the book for me.
What the book turns out to be is more a description of New York after 9/11 and looks at the people living there and how they cope. It also looks at what affect this has one the marriage of our narrator Hans van den Broek and his wife Rachel who cannot cope in the aftermath and such atrocities, this was for me the most interesting story in the book. It isn't Hans who has the plan to make a cricket pitch it is in fact Chuck a character with darkness who doesn't seem to be all he appears. A great unreliable character though, he sadly isn't in the book as much as I would have liked as I found him quite entertaining. The rest of the story evolves around what happens in the years between Rachel leaving and Hans hearing that Chuck is dead.
I didn't really gel with this book at all. I started of liking it however the marital strife of a life changed by chaos and horror in New York is done and dusted within fifty pages or so. Then what follows is a succession of characters and incidents that flow through Hans depressing years after of which all bar Chuck and cricket come and go with no real relevance or point. This seems like a very long winded essay of the writer's thoughts on America and the cultural societies in New York after 9/11 which drifts off at tangents that I couldn't follow. I just didn't care what happened to them again bar Chuck, I wont say the ending but I was left confused and slightly non-plussed and all in all quite nonchalant.
For me, though I know many people have absolutely loved this book, I ended up feeling quite disappointed and I wasn't that excited about the book anyway. I didn't feel I knew enough about Hans to want to follow his story and could actually see why his wife left him, though technically she was leaving the city. I did give the book a fair chance and I did finish it when at some points I didn't want to, so I gave it my all I just don't think it was quite the book for me.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
It's just not cricket - but it is a good book
I've heard many people - some of whom are fellow reviewers here on Amazon - describe this as a book about cricket in America. It is not. Read more
Published 5 days ago by Sport Nut
Boring,boring,boring
This book bored me to tears, apart from this bit: 'My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.', which made me puke.
Published 1 month ago by Poffertje
Not just for cricket fans.....
Hans is a prosperous Dutch guy who works in the financial sector in New York as an equities analyst advising on oil prices. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Wynne Kelly
Difference between grandiosity and thinking big
Towards the end of Netherland, the protagonist Hans cuttingly tells his friend Chuck: "There is a difference between grandiosity and thinking big. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Tracey
A Dutchman in New York
This is a strange and unexpected novel. It's about cricket, but it's not about cricket. It's about friendship between people who are not really friends. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Ms. V. Hoyle
An excellent & original book
I was completely engrossed in this book after I read the first 10 pages. It offers superb characterization, a plot line that easily moves between England, Holland and America. Read more
Published 5 months ago by oldhasbeen
The depth of the characters is overwhelmed by the events
This is a well written book covering some difficult and very emotive subjects. Joseph O'Neill writes well, though I did find it difficult to connect with some of the characters in... Read more
Published 6 months ago by D. Brown
Not quite bowled over
There probably aren't many thrillers with a strong cricketing theme, and even fewer set largely in the USA involving Dutch characters who also have connections with the UK. Read more
Published 7 months ago by S. Jones
Disappointing
Disappointing. A man gazes navel-wards for 200 or so pages. There's only so much sympathy I can have for a man that earns a zillion a year and likes cricket, even if his wife did... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Frootle
More than just Cricket
A story of post 9/11 New York, the effect of that terrorist outrage on a family and a story of cricket to sew it all together. Read more
Published 9 months ago by A. Browne
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