With a title like A Beautiful Young Wife, this is of course about the decline of an older husband. Professor Edward Landauer, virologist in avian flu at Utrecht University, sees Ruth Walta’s bottom passing on a bicycle and knows she must be his. Full of autumnal entitlement, at 15 years her senior even Edward is surprised when this vegetarian PhD student of sociology loves him back. They marry. But with time, incompatible ideas — about vivisection, interior decoration and the meaning of human good — drive Edward to a public bathroom and into the arms of his colleague, Marjolein. As a regular at any coffee shop in a university town you may well overhear a story like it, invariably soliciting the same response: ‘How predictable.’
It is testament to Wieringa’s perfectly dosed prose (translated with elegance by Sam Garrett) and unfaltering narrative control that Edward’s story flirts with banality, but this seems only to intensify its emotional effect.
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