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After her acclaimed debut poetry collection in 2010, she was considered a prodigy by many. Her first novel, The Opposite of a Human Being, published in 2017, was nominated for the ECI Literature Prize. It is an engaged, hybrid book in which essay and poetry are interwoven to highlight the problems of climate change.

Lieke Marsman

But this essay is not just about being ill, it also delves deep into political issues that become personal. The book is a light-foot­ed rally against populism, against facile political assumptions about informal care and about the consequences of being ill.At first, twenty-seven-year-old Lieke Marsman’s shoulder pain was diagnosed as a repetitive strain injury, she was a writer after all. But when the pain finally became unbearable, scans revealed a malignant tumour: a rare form of cartilage cancer not usually found in younger people. Behind her right shoulder blade was a lump the size of a grapefruit. Mars-man went under the knife a week later. Tumour removed, cancer gone, problem solved – except that her existence had been turned upside down. She decided to write down her thoughts and observations in order to give shape to the chaos she was caught up in.Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag provided inspiration. In addition to accounts of their personal experiences, both books provide an analysis of the status of cancer and cancer patients in society, an approach Marsman also adopts.The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes is not merely introspective, it is also a plea to look around and assume one’s social responsibility in a sick society. This essay is about much more than just a young woman struggling with cancer, it addresses the meaning and consequences of illness in our modern neoliberal society.

Ten poems and an essay about cancer, for which Marsman was treated. But it also about so much more: about loneliness, being on benefits, economic sensationalism in culture, and freedom of expression.

A very personal text with a high degree of urgency. Every word strikes home.

Book

Non-Fiction

Asset

Assets

De volgende scan duurt vijf minuten

In 'The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes' Lieke Marsman investigates through ten poems and an essay how a sick body relates to a sick world. ‘My little cancer book’ Marsman called it on Twitter.

The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes

‘Did they ever consider the possibility that apathy might also be the result of actually having values?’ Marsman muses. ‘Everything matters: depression can just as easily stem from an excessive lust for life as from a lack of it.’ Striking observations that echo the words of Naomi Klein, which also feature in the novel: ‘What if part of the reason so many of us have failed to take action is not because we are too selfish to care but because we are utterly overwhelmed by how much we do care?’These quotes capture the theme of this novel: our ability to care about ‘an abstract or seemingly far-off problem’. Why is it that the issue of climate change leaves us unmoved? A topic for an essay rather than a novel, you might say. Perhaps, but the innovative fervour on display here renders such distinctions irrelevant. Marsman regularly strays beyond the bounds of the traditional novel to embrace the clarity of more discursive and poetic forms, and does so seamlessly.At the same time, the strong central character and storyline attest to the fact that this is still very much a novel. Ida, a young climatologist, embarks on an internship at an institute tasked with demolishing a dam in the Italian Alps. But this is also a book about love, a concern that looms as large as global warming – for Ida the two are interwoven in her contemplative nature, her analytical capacity and her tendency towards self-absorption.Marsman has an astounding ability to make her reflections our reflections without compromising their personal nature. The novel’s eclectic form is central to this achievement: we get to know Ida through the aphoristic poem ‘I Hate the Storm, I Love the Storm’ and through her essays. This produces highly relevant philosophical literature that touches on all manner of intellectual preoccupations, from our inner workings to the world around us. Above all, it produces literature with the power to move.This is an extraordinary, compelling novel of ideas, profound and poetic. Cerebral too, in its relentless exploration of how our minds operate. Which brings us back to our arrogance in imagining ourselves to be the centre of the universe. A claim the natural world shrugs off with glacial indifference.

An extraordinary and gripping novel of ideas.

The originality and flair that characterises Marsman’s poetry is very much in evidence in her novel.

Fiction

Het tegenovergestelde van een mens

One of the most persistent criticisms of contemporary writers, particularly the latest generation, is also the most inaccurate: that they are a bunch of navel-gazers. True, the work of young authors is often deeply rooted in personal experience, but they are equally concerned with exploring how the individual relates to the complexity of the modern world. The most fascinating book on this very subject has been published: the bold and original debut by celebrated poet Lieke Marsman.

The Opposite of a Person

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