Tommy Wieringa

A quirky coming-of-age novel set in an archetypically shut-in small community behind the dyke of one of the Great Rivers that cross the middle of the Netherlands. Lomark is a place so obscure that when Rijkswaterstaat finally decide to build a bypass around it, they don't bother to provide the villagers with a connection, and it seems their only way out in future will be over Piet Honing's ferry.

The chronicler of Lomark life is Frans, who has lost the use of both legs and one arm in an show more accident in his mid-teens, and doesn't hesitate to see the worst in those around him. But he does form a bond with another outsider in the village, the boy who insists on being called Joe Speedboat, and with a couple of other slightly less marginal teens. Where Frans is necessarily someone who spends most of his time sitting in his wheelchair and watching, Joe takes life in both hands, committing himself to projects that should be well beyond his skill level, quite apart from being things no sane adult would allow him to do. Wieringa allows himself a bit of Tom Sawyerish bending of realism here to demonstrate how Joe's absolute conviction that he can do something usually permits him to achieve it, even if the results aren't always what he might wish. Joe's Egyptian stepfather Mahfouz ("Papa Africa") is credited with a similar semi-magical ability to complete projects.

This isn't exactly an escapist fantasy about adolescence, though. We're always being pulled down to earth by Frans's darkly cynical realism, and we are shown that these kids don't live happily ever after — they suffer the same fate as all the rest of us, and turn into adults who have to deal with the pointlessness, mediocrity and arbitrary pain of real life.

Wieringa is very good at what he does, there are a lot of sharp observations of provincial, working-class Dutch culture and some good jokes. But it's a bit hard to say whether there's any more than that. show less

In this short, bleak snapshot of immigration and the refugee crisis, Wieringa follows two young Dutch women, both daughters of Moroccan immigrants, on holiday in Morocco. They run into a Dutch acquaintance, Saleh, and allow him to pressure them into helping him smuggle a young man, Murat, across the Strait of Gibraltar in the boot of their hire-car. Everything goes horribly wrong, Saleh disappears with their money, and the two women are left stranded in Spain with a dead man in the back of show more the car.

It's all very neatly and efficiently done, Wieringa pins down the problems faced by second-generation immigrants who feel Dutch when they are with Moroccans and Moroccan when they are with Dutch people, and he turns his point-of-view character Elhan into a very interesting and believable person — her hairdresser-friend Thouraya is maybe a little bit more of a cardboard cutout. In any case, it's their background that has got them into the situation, but once in it they are ordinary people faced with the sort of problem no-one is prepared for, and they react in exactly the sort of distressed and confused way any of us might.

I didn't really see the point of the little essay on the geo-history of the Mediterranean basin Wieringa sticks in as a prologue: it is a very nice piece of writing, but it doesn't really add anything to the story except a rather incongruously academic tone. He could just as well have put in an essay on the design history of Audi cars and the way the spare-tyre well is manufactured, for all the good it does. show less

Wieringa adopts the opening line of the Book of Exodus for the title of his novel. This is indeed appropriate since he is exploring the issue of migration in THESE ARE THE NAMES. Migration is a timeless theme that still resonates today. It arises from the universal human desire to start over, to survive and experience forms of redemption. It manifests in both physical and spiritual forms. People seeking a better life, escaping harsh conditions like war, repression, hunger and poverty, show more represent the former. While in the latter, people seek respite from religious intolerance, new identities and meaningful lives.

There are two distinct plots in the novel—one is more physical while the other is spiritual. Seven desperate refugees wander a desolate landscape reminiscent of the Eurasian steppe. They were seduced by human traffickers with the promise of a better life in a promised land only to be betrayed and abandoned. Crossing harsh terrain on foot without food or water, they fall prey to a form of magical thinking that is reminiscent of a religious experience. With this story, Wieringa definitely intends to evoke the image of the migration of the Israelites out of Egypt.

The second plot line focuses on Pontus Beg, who struggles with ageing and making sense of his position in the world. He views himself as “still too young to really be considered old, but he could see the writing on the wall.” His life is “not a failure, but perhaps not the path of wisdom he might have imagined as a child.” Memories of a song his mother used to sing and a menorah she kept hidden prompt him to seek the advice of the last remaining Jew in his community, Rabbi Zalman Eder. He finds the realization that he may be a Jew to be strangely rejuvenating. “That he belonged somewhere, that was the poignant thing.”

Beg is a well-drawn, nuanced character. On the one hand, he is kind and humorous taking his job as a policeman seriously. He can’t forget the murdered female backpacker whose body remains unidentified in the town’s morgue. On the other, Pontus is capable of making a few bucks through corrupt policing, sleeping with his housekeeper, and beating a young man almost to death during a routine traffic stop because he just didn’t like his attitude.

Conversely, the migrant characters are stereotypes, consisting of a tall man, a young boy, an addict, a poacher, an Ethiopian, and a woman. None are well fleshed out in the narrative. In fact this story reads like a fairytale with abundant biblical symbolism but lacking in subtlety. The black man is at first stigmatized, but latter endowed with magical properties that can lead them out of the wilderness.

Wieringa deftly explores themes of justification by faith and the significance of borders. He recognizes the transformative nature of religious belief in Beg’s search for a Jewish identity and the magical thinking of the refugees. The novel also exploits the image of all sorts of borders that can confront migrants—between village and steppe, culture and savagery, past and present. Historically, “borders were soft and permeable, but now they were cast in concrete and hung with barbed wire.” Evoking today’s migratory dilemmas, he writes: “A wave of people crashed against those walls; it was impossible to keep them all back.”

Wieringa’s prose is clear. The mood is unrelentingly dark evoking the post-Soviet collapse of infrastructure and morals with the remote village of Michailopol. Likewise, the steppe is seen as almost Martian in its desolation. The pacing of the two narratives is steady—if a bit slow—moving inevitably toward a collision. Ironically, while musing about the wandering of the Jewish people, Beg is confronted by the reality of another people, who also have wandered in the wilderness and acquired a religion of sorts along the way. show less

Little gem of a novella with a natural kind of suspense. Two Dutch Moroccan girls with a rather spoilt lifestyle, who broke free from the suffocating chains of their traditional immigrant Berber parents, go on a holiday in Morocco in a hired audi 4. A small accident costs them their money. Penniless, and eager to get back home, they reluctantly agree to smuggle a village boy into Spain in the boot of their car. A Moroccan fixer promises them it can’t go wrong.

That’s when you know show more everything will go wrong. Thouraya is a wild, party girl; Ilham is shy and reluctant. When the ferry berths in Spain, they discover the boy in the booth has died, suffocated. Their fixer takes off. Now what? The situation in the car is tense, the smell becomes overwhelming and suffocating. Seemingly clueless, the girls stumble into some form of resolution. Thouraya uses her beauty and cunning, Ilham suffers from her consciousness and finds out that bodies in rigor mortis can not be taken out of a boot by a girl on her own. Three smart Dutch-Moroccan guys offer a way out. Thouraya makes the most of it. With a credit card the world looks up, and another corpse finds its way into some barren, sun baked field along the highway.

The language is contemporary, the atmosphere apt and at times erotic, the imagery auburn or sun-bleached, the tension is subcutaneous, the drive slow but relentless… Tommy, we want more! show less