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This was followed by the novels Liebmans ring and Een Hollandse romance (A Dutch Romance) and the collection of short stories entitled Montagne Russe. His major breakthrough came with the novel Duitse bruiloft (The German Wedding) which was translated into English, German and Russian, and was nominated for the Gerard Walschap Prize and will be made into a movie. The international film rights were also recently sold. His penultimate novel De dood van Mila Burger (The Death of Mila Burger) is being adapted as a Russian opera.

Pieter Waterdrinker

Meet Ruben Ivanovich Katz (b. 1978, Riga), the protagonist of Pieter Water­drinker’s gripping new novel, The Rat of Amsterdam. He is Latvian, Russian, Jewish and holds a passport to the ‘flower­bulb kingdom by the sea.’He and his parents left the Soviet Union less than a year before the country fell apart, traveling to Poland, Germany and the Netherlands, with Israel as the intended final destination they never reached. Only Ruben’s father is Jewish, but the Katz family pretends to be of pure descent so that they can emigrate. But that’s not the only lie in the life of this failed migrant, who seems to be carrying the entire history of the failed Soviet empire on his shoulders. Waterdrinker’s literary universe is one characterized by deceit and hypocrisy, and this new novel appears to form a thematic trilogy with his previous novels Poubelle and 40 Tchaikovsky Street.Ruben starts off working for the ‘National Poor People’s Lottery,’ which people play with a lottery ticket based on their fingerprints. He figures out a way to link together the fingerprints of people living in the same area. Later he returns to Russia, where he puts his rhetorical and creative genius to use working for the ‘Siberian Front,’ a group that organizes a reconnaissance trip through Russia for Europeans seeking to emigrate. When his childhood sweetheart Phaedra drowns, he gets the blame.Ruben Katz, who is writing all this down at the age of 41 in a Dutch prison cell, swears he is innocent of Phaedra’s death – that his life has just happened to him, including his metamorphosis from human to rat.Ruben is the perfect vehicle for Water­drinker to take on big topics such as love and death as well as offer his view of humankind and the precarious times we live in. Through Ruben, he gives a face to the nebulous figure of the Russian ­- that unknown, yet feared and maligned other who, Waterdrinker shows, is not an ounce better or worse than anyone else in Europe.Waterdrinker’s literary talent is revealed in the long, breathless sentences and stunning turns of phrase that propel the story forward and constantly reveal new layers of meaning. Language is like liquid gold in Waterdrinker’s hands.

Reading Waterdrinker is a joy. No trepidation, no clenched butt cheeks, no political correctness of any kind. No Dutch parsimoniousness. No – his writing is rich, fatty, all-or-nothing, grand – like a giant, like a Russian.

He paints a grotesque but entirely credible picture of the mentality of those people who cynically exploit charity.

Book

Fiction

Asset

Assets

De rat van Amsterdam

Pieter Waterdrinker’s panoramic new book is a hellish indictment of the charity industry, the fraudulent use of EU funds, and shysters who pay gratuitous lip service to altruism but are really just looking to line their own pockets.

The Rat of Amsterdam

After the fall of Communism, the Russian capital became a hotbed of criminalized capitalism in which corruption, greed, self-interest, and decadent pleasure predominated. Joost tries desperately to find a way out of the chaos to a new and above all, a better life. Literature could offer one way; Joost, not just an economist had tried writing but gave up after three unsuccessful novels. Now his publisher holds out the prospect of foreign translations which may offer him another chance. Will Joost undergo the same metamorphosis as his friend, the wealthy but fanatic socialist Berend Braverman? He gets caught up in Berend’s plans and intrigues and these make A Dutch Romance a topical and penetrating view of society – at times cynical, but above all, readable. In 125 short chapters Waterdrinker sketches the dilemmas that tear apart his principal character. A Dutch Romance is meaty, and a pleasure to read too.

A novel that makes you curious about a frightening country with a frightening capital.

Waterdrinker’s breezy tales, hotly provocative, sweep the reader along and make him as dizzy as if he had downed a stiff Stolichnaya in one gulp.

Een Hollandse romance

A 'Dutch Romance' takes place mainly in fashionable Moscow today, despite its title. Waterdrinker writes about Joost Schlingemann, a successful businessman in his thirties, but a manic-depressive, a man in a crisis. The story starts when Joost is left by his wife Suzette, at the very moment that he has attained the success that she has always expected of him. He has become a highly paid consultant with a company advising Russian firms about new products. Joost and Suzette live in Moscow with their son Max; they have a lovely dacha, a nanny, and a car with chauffeur. Nevertheless Suzette takes a dislike to Russia and returns to Holland with Max, precipitating Joost’s crisis. He leaves his job, moves to a dreary apartment, and throws himself into pointless nightlife.

A Dutch Romance

Moscow 1990. Lawyer and orphan, Olaf Weber, makes a lot of money on the black market and by conning tourists. Then he meets the charming scoundrel, Alexander Perelman, who tells him that the balsam used to preserve Lenin’s body also makes wrinkles disappear. Eternal youth and immeasurable riches are within hand’s reach. Olaf must find out what the ingredients are and invest in the project.During his search for the balsam’s secret formula, colourful figures pass review, such as Ivan the Nose, Ivan the Chin, perfume expert Maurice Maupassant and master embalmer Abrikosov. The quest begins at Lenin’s mausoleum and leads from Siberia to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine. There, with the help of his great-aunt Felicia, Olaf manages to find the formula and keep it out of the hands of an armed cleric who has been following him for months.The recipe turns out to be simple, but completely useless: the balsam doesn’t work on living people. Olaf finds happiness, not in business, but through his love for the beautiful Masha. They move to France together where he becomes a writer.

A book with an exotic elegance.

Nothing is what it seems in this picaresque novel: the conman gets conned, the lovely lady who talks about orgies is still a virgin and Aunt Felicia turns out to have been Jewish all along.But there is no ambiguity about the essential matters: the destructive influence of 20th century ideologies, the importance of parental love, and the author’s compassion for characters who strive after an independent existence under their control. Lenin’s Balsam is an ode to freedom and love, a compelling and moving novel about an orphaned folk and a nation adrift.

A hilarious quest, written in a wonderful baroque style.

Lenins balsem

'Lenin’s Balsam' describes a young man’s animated search for a mysterious cream. The story takes place in Russia in the period immediately following the Cold War when fortune hunters and profiteers made their move.

Lenin’s balsem

But after ten years she finds herself in a windy coastal town, with a dead-end job in domiciliary care, no children and a disillusioned, unemployed husband who humiliates her.One day, her old friend Asja turns up at her rental apartment. Asja tells Mila that she has apparently stolen the heart of an eccentric millionaire, Romanovski, who has seen a photo of her. When Mila takes up Romanovski’s invitation to go to Moscow, she enters a world that, in terms of decadence, has many similarities with the late 19th century tsarism, including duels, serfs and landaus. From his masterly descriptions of the excesses at parties and in clubs, it is clear that the author is familiar with both the glitz and the less glamorous underbelly of Moscow.Romanovski and Mila prefer to retire to a fairytale-like estate in the forest, where a new feudal age seems to have dawned. While Romanovski works on a comprehensive book on the Lipizzaner breed of horse, Mila attempts to liberate herself from her former life in the Netherlands. Their happy, secluded existence forms a fine contrast with the uprooted nouveau riche in Moscow, who are constantly seeking ever-greater extravagances. Their contentment appears to be complete when Mila becomes pregnant, but Romanovski’s shady past increasingly becomes a threat to their happiness. Fate eventually strikes and Mila is forced to begin all over again.De dood van Mila Burger reads as a captivating classical tragedy, full of lascivious scenes and sentences. Waterdrinker is a master narrator who leads his characters to their demise while again demonstrating the power of a good story.

In many respects 'De dood van Mila Burger' is a novel about twenty-first-century Russia, dished up according to the laws of the nineteenth-century novel. Fluent, expressive, amusing.

'De dood van Mila Burger' is a classic tragedy. It is quality prose. Exuberant in a rather un-Dutch way.

De dood van Mila Burger

Already in the Prologue to 'De dood van Mila Burger' (The Death of Mila Burger), the author has told us that calamity is always lurking in the wings and strikes when one is not expecting it. When Mila is still a child, her grandfather is ground to death in a centrifuge when a drunken colleague turns the wrong handle.
Mila grows up with her grandmother in the Russian city of Kazan in the latter years of the Soviet era. After a dreary university period, she meets Dutchman Nico Burger and decides to follow him to his homeland.

The Death of Mila Burger

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