The Dutch Wife
A Novel
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Amsterdam, May 1943. As the tulips bloom and the Nazis tighten their grip across the city, the last signs of Dutch resistance are being swept away. Marijke de Graaf and her husband are arrested and deported to different concentration camps in Germany. Marijke is given a terrible choice: to suffer a slow death in the labour camp or—for a chance at survival—to join the camp brothel.
On the other side of the barbed wire, SS officer Karl Müller arrives at the camp hoping to live up to his father’s expectations of wartime glory. But faced with a brutal routine of overseeing executions and punishments, he longs for an escape. When he encounters the newly arrived Marijke, this meeting changes their lives forever.
Woven into the narrative across space and time is Luciano Wagner’s ordeal in 1977 Buenos Aires, during the heat of the Argentine Dirty War. In his struggle to endure military captivity, he searches for ways to resist from a prison cell he may never leave.
From the Netherlands to Germany to Argentina, The Dutch Wife braids together the stories of three individuals who share a dark secret and are entangled in two of the most oppressive reigns of terror in modern history. This is a novel about the blurred lines between love and lust, abuse and resistance, and right and wrong, as well as the capacity for ordinary people to persevere and do the unthinkable in extraordinary circumstances.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Keith's lackluster debut tells the stories of an SS officer in love with a married Dutch woman who's been forced into prostitution by the Nazis in 1943, and the disappearance of a student revolutionary some 30 years later in Argentina. After being arrested in Amsterdam, beautiful Marijke de Graaf is separated from her beloved husband, Theo. After learning that Theo has been taken to Buchenwald, she is sent to work at the camp's brothel. There, she catches the eye of Karl M ller, an officer on the rise who is ambivalent about Nazi ideology. This story dovetails with that of Luciano Wagner, a student in Buenos Aires in 1977, who's kidnapped by government officials who are trying to quash an uprising. Luciano is only tangentially involved with the movement, drawn to it mostly by his crush on his friend Fabi n, but he's nonetheless interrogated and tortured. With the help of Gabriel, a fellow prisoner, he's later assigned a job handling top-secret files, which he tries to smuggle out. On top of the uneven writing, Keith's characterization of Karl as a conflicted man trying to be two people is handled without nuance, as is Luciano's strained relationship with his disapproving father. The novel's two stories conflate in a poignant resolution, but it isn't enough to rescue an unsuccessful narrative. This review has been revised to more accurately reflect the character Marijke's experience at the concentration camp.
