Breakwater

Some secrets refuse to stay buried …

Emilia has it all: a rewarding career as a statistician, a wonderful husband, and two healthy young sons. Having escaped Amsterdam for a life in the countryside, she and Bruch pass their time performing endless jobs around the house. But when a brief moment of panic triggers the memory of a traumatic experience from twelve years before, Emilia finds herself floating away from her average existence. The secret she’s kept for so long refuses to stay hidden, and as Emilia’s grip on reality loosens, heavy rains begin to fall. In this critically acclaimed novel, Schermer explores the impact of sexual violence, and whether or not it’s possible to truly know another person. Breakwater is a haunting examination of memory and trauma, written in prose stunning in its frankness and precision.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marijke Schermer is a novelist and playwright. Her stage work has been performed by several companies and translated into various languages. Her novel Breakwater was shortlisted for the ECI Literature Prize, has been sold to Spain, Switzerland, and Denmark, and is currently being made into a film. Upon publication of her novel Love, If That’s What It Is—shortlisted for the prestigious Libris Literature Prize 2020—Schermer was hailed as “fast becoming one of the most interesting writers in the Netherlands.”

QUOTES
"Schermer leaves you out of breath and makes you reevaluate your own most self-evident assumptions."
-ROXANE VAN IPEREN, author of The Sisters of Auschwitz, on Love, If That’s What It Is

“Breakwater is a book that hurts. The supreme happiness and blunt violation of it are placed side by side with great precision. Ineluctably, it advances toward a climax. Now I want to read this writer’s other work too.” —De Groene Amsterdammer

“Her second novel starts in an exemplary and classical fashion in all senses. Schermer work reminds one of Ian McEwan’s. But with the ending she then mocks the classical form and norm. This is excellent literature.” —NRC

“What Marijke Schermer does in Breakwater is incredible. The story—in language that streams and flows and hits home—gets increasingly oppressive.” —MARJON KOK

Author
“In Breakwater I wanted to explore the idea of nurturing secrets for self-protection, and it is partly thanks to the writing of this book that I am now searching more for openness and candor, because not speaking can also make you lonely. So I try to fight the reticence in myself, stretching myself up and out, and in this way also reaching out more to others.”

Translator
“The shifts between different time periods in this novel presented an even greater challenge than the pitch-perfect dialogue. The reader is never left in any doubt as to time and place, but past events intrude vividly into Emilia’s present-day experiences, so it was important not to make the transitions too clear-cut. Anything more than a slight nudge might fragment the narrative. It was a matter of teasing out all the clues the author provides and using them as subtly yet effectively in English as she achieves in Dutch.”

Publisher
“In Schermer’s masterful dialogues one recognizes her skills as a scriptwriter; she is great at saying what is not being said. She manages to write between the lines about painful experiences, such as sexual assault, and shows how we can tend to keep things to ourselves, attempting, through silence, to protect ourselves and our loved ones, until these silences become suffocating and end up causing more harm than good. Schermer’s razor-sharp observations about our inability to communicate with even those closest to us cut to the quick. This novel just blew me away.”