believes she can rule the world despite being treated badly by her older
brother Waldo, to whom she looks up nevertheless. When the entire family
Jansen is on holiday in Scotland, Christine acts a bit too much on an impulse of
hatred towards Waldo and feels that she has to flee. In a moment of panic, she
hides herself in an unlocked car on the ferry to the island of Mull, together with
her baby-brother Tommie.
It just so happens that the car belongs to another Dutchwoman, Agnes Stam,
who is on her way to her family cottage on the island, probably for the last time.
Agnes, seventy years old, comes from a big family of siblings, though now she
is the only one left. She has only the children of her brothers or their wives to
deal with now. They haunt her thoughts as she is on her way to the cottage in
which she has spent almost every summer. She is accompanied by the ashes
of her dearest brother Robert, the last of her siblings to die. She wants to
scatter his ashes on the beach near their cottage as was his last will, and
perhaps decide on a plan to keep the cottage in the family, despite the
intention of the other bereaved to rent the cottage or sell it in order to make
some money. Agnes, as the last of her siblings and the only one who has
remained unmarried, feels like her ‘family’ has become a hostile environment
now, quite the contrary of what it used to be when her brothers where still alive
and they spent every summer in the cottage on the island.
Agnes will discover the two children soon enough, but she is wary of calling
the police because she feels that the reason for them running away must have
been a nasty incident. Christine and Agnes will bond over the special
relationship they have with their older brother, despite the fact that there is a
gulf of sixty years of time and experience between them. Agnes tries to find out
what has happened in the Jansen family whilst she has to navigate her own
memories of a family and a place that will soon be gone forever.
Renate Dorrestein is a master at inventing ridiculous plots and make them
probable through her writing. She infuses the characters with thoughts and
motivations that make sense for these characters in their world, even if it would
not make sense in our world. ‘A crying shame’ (original Dutch title: ‘Hidden
flaws’) is really a character study of two women at very different stages in their
life, one at the beginning and one at the end, whilst it is also a study of family-
dynamics and the influence these can have on the individual. It contains
elements of many genres; it is part thriller, part family drama and part comedy
and it also evokes its locales beautifully.
Ms Dorrestein shows herself a writer of extraordinary quality, with a gift for
drawing characters and an entire environment in which these characters can
exist. Her prose is very down-to-earth and ‘normal’ and can be as humorous at
one turn as it is evocative the next. ‘A crying shame’ is a literary gem that is so
unusual yet so craftily written that it feels natural and real; it could have been a
lost classic by Iris Murdoch, who on occasions seems to be alive and well in the
character of Agnes herself.
