Published in the Netherlands in 2010; published in translation by Hogarth on January 13, 2015
Bonita Avenue is an intricate relationship drama, the kind of story I might deride as a soap opera if it were not crafted in such elegant prose. It is a big, complex novel. The characters are its strength, starting with Aaron Bever, self-destructive photographer whose shaky mental health deteriorates during the eight-year course of the novel. Bever once befriended (and practiced judo with) Siem Sigurius, a winner of the Fields Medal who taught at Berkeley. Aaron met Siem in Holland when Aaron was dating Joni, the daughter of Tineke, Siem's second wife. Other key characters include Joni's troubled younger sister Janis and Siem's troubled son Wilbert, who remained in Holland in the care of his uncle (and later in prison) after the Sigurius family moved to America.
The story swivels around the pivotal date of May 13, 2000, when a fireworks warehouse exploded in Roombeek, a suburb of Enschede. Much of the drama stems from a secretive but lucrative business enterprise in which Joni and Aaron engaged while they were dating. We learn about that time in Aaron's life in flashbacks that are inspired by a chance encounter Aaron has with Tineke on a train, eight years after Joni moved to America. We also learn about the Sigurius family history from Joni's perspective and from Siem's as the novel's focus shifts from chapter to chapter. It is a tortured history. This is a family of secrets, each more startling than the last. Their discovery tears lives and relationships apart.
The novel's theme is shame, living with it, living without it, choosing not to live because of it. Sometimes the story treads a thin line between drama and melodrama. Since Bonita Avenue scores points for both entertainment and literary value, that didn't bother me until late in the novel, when several scenes that are a bit over-the-top give way to a scene that is way over-the-top. There may be too many shocks in Bonita Avenue for a single novel to bear. At some point, the sheer weight of them begins to detract from the novel's credibility. Siem, who teaches probability theory, says that the probability of the improbable happening is huge, but when the improbable happens over and over, I have to wonder whether it is all just too much. Despite that, my interest in the improbable story never wavered. Still, the story ends quite abruptly and when it did, I felt relieved.
Peter Buwalda imagines an interesting continuum of characters that range from the sexually repressed to the shockingly liberated, from the relatively stable to the wildly unhinged. Point of view and time frames change from chapter to chapter, challenging the reader to understand who is speaking and when the described events took place. That's a reasonable literary technique -- there's nothing wrong with challenging a reader -- but I was troubled by the story's redundancy, particularly in explanations of central events in characters' lives. Buwalda's evocative prose and strong characterization earned my admiration and recommendation despite my reservations about the plot and the failure to deliver a tighter story.
RECOMMENDED