This book En wat als dit liefde is, was written by Sophie van der Stap who is famous for her book Meisje met negen pruiken in which she describes living with her cancer treatment. When I say famous I mean famous in the Netherlands, although I believe it has been translated in quite a few languages. I've never read her bestseller, but when my mum visited me in Edinburgh she brought the book I'm reviewing here, so I decided to give it a go.
People who have been reading my blog may have noticed that I'm not a big fan of Dutch literature. I often find it either contains too many explicit sex scenes, or it describes the Second World War, or it just mixes both these topics. This weeks' book though is nothing like that. I'm not sure I want to describe it as literature either though. No reason to get sucked into a debate about which term to use for this novel, let me just quickly describe what it is about (don't worry, this won't take long as I know that there are no translations for this book and only my fellow Dutchies may find this interesting).
The book is about a blind woman in Paris Marianne de Grenelle who likes to be thought of as invisible and likes to spy on her neighbours without anyone noticing her, and her friendship with socialite Tara who has one lover after the other and likes to describe all these events in her blog. This novel is about what love really is and the fact that everyone always thinks the grass is greener on the other side. Marianne has left her boyfriend 25 years ago and is not sure if this was the right decision and Tara cannot chose between her abundance of men. Both of the women are jealous of the other's situation.
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