The Service - Couverture rigide

Benders, Martijn

Couverture rigide

ISBN 13 : 9798257541452

Editeur : Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

Huub is a man of the shadows. For two years he has watched the poets from a derelict Citroën, armed with a notebook and a hernia that has opinions about everything. His assignment: decide whether poetry poses a threat to public order. His conclusion, day after day: no.

Then the department acquires Orpheus — an algorithm that reads poems, letters, till receipts and napkin scribblings and finds patterns the human eye was trained not to see. Orpheus flags Kullenaar. Orpheus flags Victor de Wilde, a young poet whose words do something no surveillance report can describe. Orpheus flags Pijper, a silent man among the bison-soldiers in a canal house in Amsterdam. And slowly, almost against his will, Orpheus begins to flag Huub himself.Because there is a place, the old poets say, where a man's attention settles. Move the point, and the world re-assembles. Huub's point has been fastened to the state for thirty years. Now, among poets who consent to nothing, it has started to drift.

The Service is a darkly comic, philosophically precise novel about bureaucratic surveillance, the irreducibility of poetry, and the slow disarticulation of a man who has spent his life filing reports on the wrong war. Written in the literary tradition of Couperus and Thomas Bernhard, with a venom and humor entirely its own, it is the first novel by one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary European letters.

Praise for M.H. Benders:

"The great talent of his generation." — Gerrit Komrij
"Better than T.S. Eliot." — Arjan Peters, de Volkskrant

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Independently published
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798257541452
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 285
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Manufactured by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg