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Archipelago Books

The Hairdresser’s Son

The Hairdresser’s Son

by Gerbrand Bakker, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer

$22.00
$22.00
Available as E-Book
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When his wife tells him she was pregnant, Cornelis packs his bags and boards a plane—a day later he is dead. Now grown, Simon roams the barbershop his father left him, honing razors and polishing mirrors in a shop marked FERMÉ. He sees his customers one by one, massaging scalps and shaving throats in an intimate, physical dance. There’s only one customer whose presence in Simon’s impeccable shop breaks this silent routine: the writer. Trimming the fine tips of the writer’s eyebrows, Simon loses himself in a parallel life—one where he lives and grows old with the writer, shaping a crewcut around an “old, weathered face.” The writer, looking for a life to fold into his next book, becomes entranced by the mystery surrounding Simon’s father—in the patterns of their conversation, Cornelis’s absence is renewed. As Simon begins to scour for the traces his father left behind, a carefully observed portrait of love and loneliness emerges. With subdued prose and bracing, sometimes pungent closeness, Gerbrand Bakker writes life itself into his characters.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781962770323
Pages: 220
Publication Date:

Praise

To say that Gerbrand Bakker hasn’t forgotten how to write a novel would be an understatement. With The Hairdresser’s Son, he presents himself as one of the very best writers the Netherlands has to offer . . . With this vivid prose, he makes Simon fascinating, he makes him someone — perhaps the greatest and most loving thing a writer can do. For the reader this results in the almost magical illusion that is the most extraordinary (and, I believe, unforgettable) thing about this novel: the sense of having really seen someone. Gerbrand Bakker has written his characters to life.
—NRC Magazine

Enthralling in that although nothing feels invented, the pages still seem to exude something magical . . . Simply narrated scenes, terrifying and moving at once.
—De Groene Amsterdammer

The charm of Bakker’s book is how finely every element is balanced, how perfectly the story is paced . . . Bakker shows a fine gift for laconic comedy . . . The great pleasure of this novel is how it has just enough plot to allow us to relish its beautifully turned observations of birds and beasts, weather and water.
—Tim Parks, New York Review of Books

This is a quiet book, humble in tone, with a fine, self-deprecating humor . . . It leaves the reader touched and with the impression of having seen and smelled the ever-damp Dutch platteland.
—Times Literary Supplement

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