“As human beings, we live by emotions and thoughts. We exchange them when we are in the same place at the same time, talking to each other, looking into each other’s eyes, brushing against each other’s skin. We are nourished by this network of encounters and exchanges. But, in reality, we do not need to be in the same place and time to have such exchanges. Thoughts and emotions that create bonds of attachment between us have no difficulty in crossing seas and decades, sometimes even centuries, tied to thin sheets of paper or dancing between the microchips of a computer. We are part of a network that goes far beyond the few days of our lives and the few square meters that we tread.”
– Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time
Take all of the 19th-century mysteries and conspiracies swirling at the heart of Emily Brontë’s life, how so much inexplicable genius came out of a parsonage on the Yorkshire moors, haunted by premature deaths and the question of God and Nature.
Take an enigmatic Dutch writer, with her wolf-like gaze and infinite gifts of perception, whose extraordinary books in the 21st century are starting to trickle into the English language thanks to the phenomenal talent of David McKay.
Feel the detonation that takes place when a solitary artist at the height of her powers applies repeated and cyclical pressure to a cluster of Brontëan themes, with the force of the tide: sisterhood, sibling rivalry, jealousy, death and the afterlife, the ineffable, time, obsession, creativity, marriage. The mechanisms we choose to explain our lives to ourselves, the stories we choose to transmit this meaning, determinism and random chaos.
Anjet Daanje may have written the Great Novel of Quantum Physics: a love letter spanning centuries, a spellbinding work of art and poetry and imagination that feels like a living organism, 736 pages of slippery, unpredictable particles blinking like dead stars in the darkest of nights.
This novel runs the gamut, from the brambles to the bells, the rain, the buzzing of flies, the clocks, the howling wind and the blackberries.
It feels haunted and a little otherworldly.
One of the best that I have ever read.
