The Dream Room by Marcel Möring
Nostalgic, elegiac story about a Dutch family in the 1960s and their journey from innocence to experience The story of a family – mother, father (ex-WWII pilot), twelve-year-old son, David – who live above a toy shop in a small town on the windswept Dutch coast. On the same day that David finds himself listening to the toy shop owner complaining that he can’t sell model aeroplane kits any more because kids nowadays are too lazy to glue all the pieces together, David’s father quits his job in a fit of pique and pride. A few hours later, his mother comes home, having left her job too. So, David devises a plan – and before the day is over the whole family is at home, putting model aeroplanes together. A wonderful, perfect summer ensues, suddenly interrupted by the arrival of an unexpected visitor, his father’s old friend from the war. His arrival revives old feelings of loyalty, love and hatred – and ensures that nothing will ever return to a perfect state again. Accessible, warm, funny and wise, this novel was a massive bestseller in Moring’s native Holland. A gem of a story, it has the fable-like appeal of a Miss Garnet’s Angel (but without the middle-Englandness) or of Bernard Schlink’s The Reader (but without the heavy moral overtone).The book is most reminiscent of J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country, the Booker Prize-winning English novel set just after WWI, heavy with nostalgia, evocative, melancholy.‘One of the many remarkable achievements of this precise yet mysterious novel is its brevity: into its 120-odd pages Marcel Möring folds a war memoir, a family psychodrama and a meditation on time and memoryWith a winning lightness of touch, he pinpoints that cusp of adolescence when a child begins to wake up to what he is, feeling "the first nudge in the back that later becomes the rhythm of life itself, grown-up life", and to apprehend the multi-layered pasts that have made his parents what they are. The Dream Room effortlessly weaves the freshness of a child's perspective with the wisdom of recollection. It is a miracle of compression: everything is significant, yet nothing is laboured. One races through it, eager to discover the heart of the mystery, right to the end of the stubbornly resistant coda in which the adult David offers us a fairy story; the concentrated narrative perfected into myth. And then one reads it again, still looking for the kind of answers that can't be
Marcel Moring is one of Holland’s bestselling, prizewinning authors. The Dream Room is his third novel to be published in Flamingo.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780007129683 |
| ISBN 10 | 0007129688 |
| Title | The Dream Room |
| Author | Marcel Möring |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Year published | 2002-06-05 |
| Number of pages | 128 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |