First published in the Netherlands in 1995 where it won the AKO
Literature Prize, this is the second novel from the bestselling
Dutch author. The novel begins with Kit, a bright but difficult ten
year old, spying a new girl in the school playground - she's a
sucker for an outsider and being older, oddly dressed and defiantly
aloof, the new blood fits the bill. Kit's vivid imagination sets to
the problem of who she is and she soon worms her way into the
newcomer - Ara's icy affections. So begins an intense and unusual
friendship which lasts well into the girls' thirties where this
story ends. The book is entirely made up of Kit's obsessive
monologue on the love of her life Ara and their powerful,
surprising bond with her hyperactive mind taking entertaining
diversions. Their addiction to each others' love, companionship,
but also to their individual freedom is the author's main
fascination and their entanglement becomes simultaneously more
painful and rewarding as they mature, accumulating adult obsessions
and failures along the way. The translation is a very satisfying
one - quirky, deadpan, and fits the complicated narrator well, but
whether or not the reader enjoys the book will ultimately rest on
how much they warm to Kit's dark, probing intelligence. (Kirkus UK)
On the face of it Ara and Kit, two girls in the village school, have nothing in common. Ara, the elder, is large, earthy and illiterate; Kit, her junior, is lean, brainy and interested in abstractions. Ara likes animals; Kit just reads and thinks. If the two continue to see one another when they have grown up and left school, it is because Kit cannot leave her friend alone. She is irresistibly drawn to her. The inarticulate but intuitive Ara has a soothing effect on Kit who, in turn, acts as a stimulus on Ara. In Connie Palmen’s brilliant novel of ideas, the story of their friendship is told through the eyes of Kit, and it describes with astonishing precision just how a person, and especially a person growing up, is the battleground on which the obsessive claims of the mind and the instincts strive for domination.
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