In a dark wood
By: Marcel Möring ; translated by Shaun Whiteside.
Contributors: Whiteside, Shaun.
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Published: 2009
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 449
ISBN-13: 9780007129669
Subjects: Möring, Marcel. -- Translations into English; First loves -- Fiction; Hell -- Fiction; Netherlands -- Fiction
Genres: Translations into English; Fiction
Work titles: Dis.
Description: The story takes place on a single night a Friday night in Assen a small town in the north of the Netherlands. The annual Dutch TT motor races are being held in this town of 40000 inhabitants and during the races the town swells to three times its size. Our hero is a man who wanders at night through this overcrowded town tens of thousands of people most of them drunk and clad in leather. He hasn't been to Assen in a long while and the reason he has returned tonight is to find his first love. He loses sight of her at six o'clock that night only to find her again twelve hours later. In a dark wood is a very funny take on Dante's Inferno and loosely mimics its structure. So when our hero finds his lost love again after twelve hours of wandering he has traversed the nine circles of Hell met his past and the town's sinners and is convinced that not only is he or has been in Hell but that the wrong people are sent there.
Notes: Originally published in Holland as Dis in 2006 by De Bezige Bij"--T.p. verso.