My Fathers War

The English-language debut by Dutch novelist van Dis is a grim look at a life rattled by the lasting effects of an old war. A child of refugees from Dutch Indonesia, which was occupied during WWII by Japan, the unnamed narrator grew up perceiving the marginalization of his family from mainstream Dutch society. But deeper psychological scars emerge when he is an adult as, all of a sudden, his family begins to disintegrate. First, his sister Ada dies, leaving behind a husband saddled with mental problems and a son drifting through adolescence. Then another sister, Jana, who fled to Canada years earlier, takes ill. All this trauma prompts a third sister, Saskia, to reveal memories, thought long buried, of the Japanese internment camps the family lived through before the narrator's birth. These in turn force the narrator to deal with memories of his father, a hard, cruel man who joined the family after his mother's first husband disappeared. Van Dis adeptly shows how wartime traumas linger in a society's collective memory, even creeping into everyday vocabulary. But the bleaknesss is unrelieved by humor or even color. The narrator's girlfriend remains a shadowy presence, mentioned but never seen, and moments of fulfillment are few and painfully brief. The novel's tone is so unremittingly somber that, by the end, all emotional resonance has dissipated. (Aug.)