Netherland

Updated to add: Finished reading this book when I was away at home last week. Got lots of things to catch up on right now, so I'm going to pass this post off as the review one. Made for an enjoyable read the extremely non-linear and layered narrative.

I'm about half way into Netherland by Joseph O'Neil. So far the book has been about nothing in particular or about a lot of things, whichever way you look at it. The novel follows the life of a Dutch banker Hans van den Broek in a non-linear fashion. Set in around 2008 or later, the novel shifts in and out of Hans's childhood, focuses on his life in the post 9/11 USA and its impact.
The author talks about so many different things, one mainly being about how the protagonist finds solace in cricket. The writing leaves somethings unsaid, it's suggestive, leaving it to each reader to reach the depths he wants to. More on the book when I finish it. Here are some excerpts:

I can say quite ingenuously that I was attempting to counter the great subtractions that had lessened my life and that the prospect of an addendum, even one as slight as a new licence and a new car, seemed important at that time; and no doubt I was drawn to a false syllogism involving the nothingness of my life and the somethingness of doing.

~

The pleasantness of my Holland was related to the slightness of its mysteries. There obtained a national transparency promoted by a citizenry that was to all appearances united in a deep, even pleased, commitment to foreseeable and moderate outcomes in life. Nowadays, I gather from the newspapers, there are problems with and for alien elements, and things are not as they were; but in my day - age qualifies me to use that phrase! - Holland was a providential country. There seemed little point in an individual straining excessively for or against the upshots arranges on his behalf, which had been thoughtfully conceived to benefit him from the day he was born to the day he died and hardly required explanation. There was accordingly not much call for a dreamy junior your truly to ponder connections.

~

But surely everyone can also testify to another, less reckonable kind of homesickness, one having to do with unsettlements that cannot be located in spaces of geography or history;

~

Netherland was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008. O'Neil's writing reflects familiarity with cultures, it doesn't come out as purely researched but with a grace that only someone who has experienced these different worlds can express. Curiosity sent me along to wikipedia (where else?!) to find out that the author was born in Ireland, grew up in different countries including Mozambique, Turkey, Iran and then in The Netherlands. He studied in London and currently lives in the Chelsea Hotel in New York (where this novel's protagonist also lives immediately following 9/11) with his family. No wonder.