The Dutch-Israeli author on a demonic club hit, her fish fixation, and her love of furniture restoration videos
orn in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1987, Yael van der Wouden is a writer and teacher who lectures in creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands. Her work has appeared in publications including LitHub, Electric Literature and Elle.com, and she has a David Attenborough-themed advice column, Dear David, in the online literary journal Longleaf Review. Her essay on Dutch identity and Jewishness, On Reading Anne Frank, received a notable mention in the 2018 Best American Essays collection.
A friend gave this to me and said it “changed their genetic makeup”. You’d think a novel given with the promise of a life-altering experience can only disappoint, and yet! Willdisrupt every reader’s mental equilibrium? Unlikely. Will it send some of us down an existential spiral for approximately a week? Certainly. The novel is a familiar and well-executed three-act Bildungsroman and at the same time like nothing I’ve read before.
This summer on holiday my girlfriend looked over my shoulder in bed, saw I was watching a 45-minute restoration of a wardrobe, and proceeded to make brutal fun of me. It’s grandma behaviour, she said. Surely grandmas don’t restore whole wardrobes, I said. It’s very physically demanding, and requires years of study. I did not convince her, but I’ve been trying to.
Two things came together in this one: the fact that I’m moving homes soon, and the fact that I’m eyeball-deep in research into the former Zuiderzee , which is now the IJssel lake – the body of water that scoops down into the middle of the Netherlands like a big thumb. I’ve been looking into what kinds of fish survived the transition from salty to sweet waters, how it affected life along the sea and the people’s relationship to the water. In other words, fish are on my mind these days.
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