Shutterspeed

This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Buy on Amazon Buy on BN.com Buy on Bookshop.org
*This page contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app

1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date 05 May 2015 | Archive Date 04 Mar 2015
Steerforth Press | Pushkin Press

Description

A wonderful, balanced novel about how the remains of the past reverberate in the present, Shutterspeed sensitively and delicately describes the powerful emotions which lie just beneath the surface of the unruffled sheen of village life. Joris’ father died young, and his mother moved to Spain, so he has lived with his aunt and uncle since early childhood. He is quiet and introverted, and his aunt and uncle fear that he harbours a deep resentment for the loss of his parents. The gentle pace of life in the village is suddenly disturbed when a decision is made to remove the cemetery in the centre. For the boy, this awakens various emotionally charged memories of his dead father. The books ends with the death of the boy’s foster parents, marking a definitive end to his youth.

A wonderful, balanced novel about how the remains of the past reverberate in the present, Shutterspeed sensitively and delicately describes the powerful emotions which lie just beneath the surface of...


Advance Praise

"Mortier's elegant sentences skip across the pages and rock the reader as if in a boat." - de Volkskrant


"Mortier is a master of nostalgic literature, of descriptions of a longing for a past that may never even have existed." - NRC Handelsblad


"Wonderful." - Trouw

"Mortier's elegant sentences skip across the pages and rock the reader as if in a boat." - de Volkskrant


"Mortier is a master of nostalgic literature, of descriptions of a longing for a past that may...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781782270201
PRICE $14.95 (USD)

Average rating from 8 members


Featured Reviews

In this fairly short novel, which flows with the speed of summer passing, we follow the life of a young boy, Joris, who has lived with his Aunt and Uncle since his father's death and mother's defection to Spain many years before. Aunt and Uncle are essentially his parents and love him as such though they know that Joris' mother is always out there, sending postcards from her life.

This story is about memory and reality, how we construct our lives from the bits and pieces that are handed to us. For Joris, those bits and pieces are small memories from his brief childhood with a mother and father, moments of play, family moments. These are buttressed by a drawer full of treasured photos---photos of the lost father he worships as a young boy does and the mother who has left him behind. These photos are his tie to a life that no longer exists. His father is in the graveyard. Joris knows he is loved in his current life but he is not secure.

I still have photos from those days, showing me fair-haired and sandal-shod. My father holds me by the hand as we stroll along meadows dappled by the shade of poplars, during summers that now seem greener and slower than they were. (loc 13)

Joris pores over photos for they are his link to the past and the life that wasn't.

I told myself there must be a world out there stocked with all the images that had never been captured, except by the sunshine perhaps, which always seemed to absorb a smattering of whatever it illuminated, reuniting it God knows where with all those two-dimensional figures patiently prised from frames, albums or the depths of the old suitcase in which I kept my most treasured possessions. (loc 139)

This is a bittersweet tale of a young boy coming of age. It is set in what would be called a simpler time but the emotions involved are universal and timeless. I do recommend it.

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley for the purpose of an honest review.

Was this review helpful?

Readers who liked this book also liked: