The Dutch Women (Die Holländerinnen)
Whoever enters this text falls into the abyss of our world and gazes into the darkness with eyes wide open.
The narrator, a renowned writer, is contacted by a famous theatre producer who is keen to involve her in his latest project - a play set in the tropics, the reconstruction of a case as he puts it, a kind of tropical passion with references to Herzog and Coppola. She is to record her personal impressions in detail, documenting the research and creation of the play which revolves around two Dutch women who went missing in the the Latin American jungle in 2014. A digital camera found at the scene highlighted a mystery, containing 91 consecutive photos, without any indication of what the women had been trying to capture.
A few weeks later, she sets off to join the theater group on their journey deep into the jungle. She sense a kind of danger, a discomfort that washes over her in waves, though she is unable to tell whether this comes from the landscape and climate or from the director’s plans. The disorientated feeling she gets from being displaced, the deserted roads, abandoned plantations, the silences are all the things that the director has asked her to record and transcribe. The deeper she goes, the more she loses: language, concepts, her own self, her sense of the world.
Dorothee Elmiger tells a disturbing story of humans and monsters, of fear and violence, of being lost in the universe and of the failure of narratives.
Praise for The Dutch Women:
"The best novel of the Autumn is here: Dorothee Elmiger's novel Die Holländerinnen. She has already published three highly acclaimed novels but Die Holländerinnen surpasses them all. An authorial voice reports on a lecture given by a writer who recounts a past experience in the Guatemalan jungle – an experience which only becomes visible in its entirety through the voices of various participants, yet remains inscrutable. In this metaphysical novel, the ‘foreign’ pushes Western civilization to confront its own abyss and the homage to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is clear as it quotes the novel’s most famous sentence: ‘the horror, the horror’. Dorothee Elmiger both honours and transcends the homage, thereby also demonstrating what can be gained from knowledge of and engagement with the classics"
– Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"In Die Holländerinnen, Dorothee Elmiger weaves a dense web of symbols around a missing person case. This novel is a delight to get lost into"
– TAZ
"Elmiger's narrative art has reached a new level with this book. Social and narrative theory, intellectual and contemporary history are brought together here with the utmost urgency. Formally, Die Holländerinnen is the most cohesive of her works, yet it thrives on the fact that the space within the narrative is constantly expanding. (…) This novel about narrative theatre is primarily about the drama of storytelling (…) Elmiger stages this vertigo from the broad narrative arc down to the linguistic detail. She evokes epoch-making cinematic explorations of the disruption of one's own perception and the horror of identity confusion: David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Hitcock’s Vertigo. Above all, however, she herself achieves narrative vertigo effects"
- Republik
