Uit het leven van een hond

This novel describes a Saturday in the life of Henk van Doorn, 57, ICU nurse, single. He wakes up, has breakfast, walks the dog, goes shopping, visits a former colleague and so on. An ordinary Saturday? No, not. Henk's dog appears to be sick. The animal will die, not today or tomorrow, but in the foreseeable future. That fact goes like a dragnet over the bottom of the day and brings the usual grief to the surface: that time has only one direction; that we are so vulnerable; that we are so lonely, no matter how much love we find. Yet "From the life of a dog" is certainly not a sad book. Henk has the great talent to draw a powerful carpe diem from an acute sense of mortality: live life to the full. At the end of the day we see Henk, in clairvoyant drunkenness, with his dog on the couch. What was this for a day? he wonders. A cleansing experience? A catharsis? No, it was simply a day, time that passed, the life that went on.