For fans of Marriage Story and Elena Ferrante's Days of Abandonment
Terri runs off with a lover, abandoning her children and her marriage of twenty-five years. Her husband, David, is left to take care of their two daughters, one of whom is falling in love for the first time. These four people start to question their identity outside the nuclear family. What remains of a disintegrated home, and what changes? Marijke Schermer’s Love, If That’s What It Is gives a kaleidoscopic view of a divorce, permitting the reader to enter the heads of not only the spouses, but also of the two daughters and the divorcees’ new lovers. Through several characters, the reader is presented with just as many views on relationships, while Schermer remains impartial and thus confronts readers with their own perhaps shaky romantic principles. What is love? With fresh flair and provocative perspectives, Schermer manages to provide an original and versatile answer.
About the Author
Marijke Schermer is a novelist and playwright. Her stage work has been performed by several companies and translated into various languages. Her novel Noodweer (“Severe Weather”) was shortlisted for the ECI Literature Prize in 2017 and subsequently sold to Spain, Switzerland, and Denmark. In 2019, her novel Love, If That’s What It Is was published in Dutch and Schermer was hailed as “fast becoming one of the most interesting writers in the Netherlands.” Love, If That’s What It Is was shortlisted for the prestigious Libris Literature Prize 2020 and is her first work to be published in English.
About the Translator
Hester Velmans was born in Amsterdam, but lived in five different countries while growing up, before finally settling in western Massachusetts. She is the author of the popular children’s books Isabel of the Whales and Jessaloup’s Song. The recipient of an NEA Translation Fellowship in 2014, she was previously awarded the Vondel Prize for her translation of Renate Dorrestein’s A Heart of Stone. Her most recent novel, Slipper, was published in April 2018.
Industry Reviews
'Dutch playwright Schermer explores themes of romantic ennui and individuality in her scintillating debut, a yearlong account of a deteriorating marriage.(…) The author expertly humanises each of the characters’ desires and flaws as she illuminates the raw, inner workings of a broken marriage. This is as cathartic as it is gut-churning.'
Publishers Weekly
"Marijke Schermer flawlessly analyzes how love takes its course."
Het Parool
"On every page Schermer excels with sentences that seem ordinary, but are packed with meaning. After every striking sentence, I had to put the book down for a while. This book is about love-if that's what it is, of course-and who has not become love's victim?"
Trouw
"Schermer's technical ingenuity traps you, making you question your standards, assumptions, and blind spots. This is a big and definitive, but also investigative, story about love. Schermer is fast becoming one of the most interesting writers in the Netherlands."
NRC Handelsblad
"Schermer's fresh style adds something really new to the mountain of stories about falling in love, unhappy marriages, cheating, and heartbreak-she seems to have cleared the dust of the whole theme."
De Volkskrant
" Love, If That's What It Is has the potential to become as successful as Herman Koch's The Dinner."
De Standaard
"This novel has just as careful and poetic a style and as precise a construction as her previous two. Schermer effortlessly manages to infect you again with the feelings of the novel's characters."
Tzum
