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language: Dutch
country: Netherlands (among others)
year: 2023
form: short fiction
genre(s): science fiction, fantasy
dates read: 8.7.24-7.10.24
it took months, but I’ve finally finished De komeet: Speculatieve verhalen, edited by Vamba Sherif and Martijn Lindeboom, an anthology of speculative short fiction aiming to reflect and/or reflect on racial diversity in the Netherlands. the majority of the contributors are writers of color, though there are also a few white writers (notably including Roderick Leeuwenhart, an established Dutch specfic writer) to round things out. the main reason it took a long time is that reading in Dutch is a bit excruciating still, but I definitely got better at it as it went on — I read more than 60 pages today, and while it did take several hours it also didn’t feel as overwhelming as some of the early stories did.
anyway, that’s not relevant to the book itself. as is to be expected for multiauthor short fiction anthologies, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. the anthology is built around a Dutch translation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story “The Comet”, which opens the collection. only the last two stories directly respond to “The Comet”, but at least as Sherif’s preface explains it the writers were asked to respond to some of the questions Du Bois is reflecting on, especially: how do we (or don’t we) live together, and how do we survive the end of the world?
I was frankly not blown away by much of the collection. it’s not bad, by any means, don’t get me wrong — though I had significant reservations (to put it mildly) about Roderick Leeuwenhart’s “Wat moeten wij met de wolf & hoe maken wij van hem een Nederlander?”, which seems to be equating immigrants to hungry wolves, even if it’s notionally sympathetic to the wolf, and about Shantie Singh’s “De tijdlus”, whose solution to gender-based violence appears to be…torture. aside from these, though, mostly the stories were just fine. not amazing, but fine.
the highlights for me, other than the Du Bois, were three of the final four stories in the collection:
honorable mentions are Chris Polanen’s “Under Water Surveiller”, which I would say I didn’t love in and of itself but which did make me want to read his novel Waterjager even more than I already did, and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s “Hymne van de overlevers”, which I think I should have loved but which didn’t quite land for me in a way that makes me think this is more a reflection of my Dutch reading ability than the story.
if you read Dutch and can get a copy, I think it’s probably worth reading! if I enjoyed it well enough (even if I wasn’t always blown away), actual Dutch-speakers will probably get more out of it than I did.
moods: hopeful, reflective