(Twin sisters, Lotte and Anna, share a bond that only they...)
Twin sisters, Lotte and Anna, share a bond that only they can understand. But when war comes between them, they discover that even the deepest bonds have their limits. Over ten years after being cruelly separated as children, Lotte and Anna are at last reunited. Neither had lost hope of seeing each other again, but with a turbulent Europe now on the verge of war, they find that much between them has changed. Lotte has enjoyed a privileged upbringing in liberal Holland, while Anna endured a life of poverty in a Germany increasingly entranced by Hitler's spell. With Lotte planning to marry a Jewish musician and Anna brainwashed by the anti-semitic propaganda of the Third Reich, it does not take long for the first cracks to appear in their relationship. And this is just the beginning. Can two lives, torn apart by the blood of their separate pasts, ever be reconciled?
(When the novel opens, narrator Kata Roszavolgyi, in her 4...)
When the novel opens, narrator Kata Roszavolgyi, in her 40s, has just buried her father and is now lying in bed with his son. Kata recalls growing up in Holland in the 1950s with a Dutch mother and Hungarian Jewish father, the latter a renowned composer. As a teenager she falls in love with another student named Stefan; as they grow closer, Kata learns that Stefan's mother, Ida Flinck, hid Kata's father from the Nazis during WWII. From there, the revelations pile up: Kata's father and Ida had become lovers while he hid in her house. To better protect him, Ida also began an affair with a Nazi officer. After the war, Kata's father abruptly left Ida. Soon afterward, Ida gave birth to Stefan. Is Stefan the son of the Nazi officer or the Hungarian Jew?
(When Tessa de Loo saw Albania for the first time, no fore...)
When Tessa de Loo saw Albania for the first time, no foreigners were allowed to enter. Filled with great curiosity, longing, and a sense of wonderment by this isolated land, de Loo gazed toward the mountains that stood like "the backs of patiently waiting for elephants" across the water from Corfu. Inspired by the famous Thomas Phillips portrait of Lord Byron in Albanian national costume, and enthralled by the image of Lord Byron since her teenage years, she sets about exploring not only his physical journey but attempts to understand his inner one as well. de Loo stole her way in and found a country suffering the hardships of post-communist reality and the constant and sometimes fractious clash between tradition and modernity. In the tradition of Bruce Chatwin, de Loo, the award-winning author of The Twins, has written a fascinating travelogue and a very personal reassessment of the formative chapter in Lord Byron's short life.
Tessa de Loo is the pen name of the popular Dutch novelist and short story writer Johanna Martina Duyvené de Wit. Tessa is famous for her award-winning best-selling novel De Tweeling (The Twins), and De meisjes van de suikerwerkfabriek (The Girls from the Sweet Factory).
Background
Tessa de Loo was born on October 15, 1946, in Bussum, a small town not far from Amsterdam, Netherlands. She is the oldest of three children. Her family was not rich so they lived together with a host of other family members in one house. When Tessa was three they moved to Amsterdam. Her father was a chemist. He worked in a laboratory for Organon, where new medicines were developed.
Education
After graduating from high school, Tessa de Loo studied Dutch at Utrecht University, then she quit and came back in 1976.
Tessa de Loo stopped studying at Utrecht University and taught for several years. After the newspapers published two of her short stories in 1975 and in 1978 de Loo made her debut as a writer with the short-story collection De meisjes van de suikerwerkfabriek (The Girls from the Sweet Factory) in 1983), which won Anton Wachter Prize and Gouden Ezelsoor in 1984.
After this, Tessa wrote Meander (1986), the gift novella for National Book Week 1987 Het rookoffer (The Burnt Offering), Isabelle (1989), Het mirakel van de hond (The Miracle of the Dog), and Een varken in het paleis (A Pig in the Palace, which looks at Byron’s travels in Albania). In 1993 her voluminous million-copy best-seller, novel De tweeling (translated in 2000 as The Twins) appeared, and it has proven her biggest success to date. This novel grew out of her maternal grandmother’s experiences during the war, when she hid ten Jews and two conscientious objectors in her house - in addition to her eight children. All survived the war and one of the conscientious objectors would become Tessa de Loo’s father. The starting point in this book is the meeting between two elderly women, a Dutch and a German, in the town Spa. They tell each other their life stories, but neither of them knows at first that they are twins separated from each other in childhood. In the background is the Second World War, which separated the twins, and the different effects of this war past for the German and Dutch in the present. The twins have been a resounding success since its appearance. In the meantime, more than 600,000 copies have been sold in Dutch alone. The German translation was also very successful. The film adaptation of this book led to an Oscar nomination. De Loo appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and various other magazines and anthologies.
The theme of The twins returns in Een bed in de hemel published in 2000 (translated in 2002, A Bed In Heaven). This novel is about love. The book alternates between Budapest and Amsterdam, between sexual freedom and inescapable fate, between 1944, 1956, 1965 and 1995.
De zoon uit Spanje (The Son from Spain) appeared in 2004. In this family drama, the children of a dying father, retired classical language teacher, want to make his last birthday an unforgettable family celebration. Not easy: one of them, Bardo, was evicted from his home by his father 25 years ago and never returned.
The novel Harlekino (2008) deals with the major themes of our uncertain era: the clash of civilizations and religions, displacement, and migration. Verraad me niet (Don't Betray Me) appeared in 2011 is an oppressive drama set in a typical Dutch landscape. At the end of 2013, Publisher De Arbeiderspers published the novel Kenau (2013), the gripping story of Kenau Simonsdochter Hasselaar, who persuaded about three hundred women during the Siege of Haarlem (1572-1573) to work side by side with the soldiers from the city walls, fight the enemy. A year later, in 2014, the novel Een goed nest (A Good Nest) followed, about the battle between two rival sisters.
In February 2017, Tessa's most recent novel Liefde in Pangea (Love in Pangea) was published. The story is about biologist Fidel Hulshoff, who begins to search for the motives years after his high school girlfriend committed suicide before his very eyes. This leads to a startling discovery. Part of Love in Pangea takes place in the Algarve, where Tessa de Loo lives and works. Many of her novels have been made into films, musicals, plays, and radio plays.
Quotations:
"Colour is a matter of personal opinion."
"I wish I knew how one is supposed to live. I wish somebody had taught me. Why do people we take for authorities when we are children let us down in this respect? Who is to tell us which is right? The cross, the crescent, the hammer and sickle, the smiling Buddha? do as you would be done by."
"Bridges symbolize peace and human contact."
"A beautiful bridge is a poem."
"How can a river that rises in black forest and discharges in a black sea be celebrated as blue?"
Personality
Tessa de Loo enjoys traveling. She is a philanthrope. Tessa likes people, nature, particularly mountains. She said: "I've never understood why the Netherlands is so flat. I knew from the beginning that something was wrong with our landscape, but only when I saw the Swiss mountains I did know what it was. Thanks to the Binoculars I now live in two foreign countries, Portugal and France. There are hills and mountains, you have them in all shapes and flavors - with or without whipped cream on top. If there is such a thing as "the landscape of the soul" then I have found it."
Tessa also likes walking. In her own words, the nice thing about walking is that you can do it at any time of the day or night and that you don't have to run after a ball in a club. It also combines well with writing, which is mainly an exercise in sitting posture.
Her favorite children's program was the Binoculars, a travel program.
Interests
Travelling, walking
Connections
Tessa de Loo was married around 1966 and they had a son, but beginning from 1980 they separated and Tessa lived with her son. Tessa de Loo now lives in a village in Portugal.