Abridged version of my review posted on Edith’s Miscellany on 24 January 2014

Winter is the season of storms in Europe and everybody living in coastal areas of the North Sea can certainly tell you a thing or two about it. The two biggest storm catastrophes of the twentieth century happened in the Netherlands on 31 January 1953 and in Hamburg on 16 February 1962. Both times cyclones caused huge tidal surge which broke dikes and cost the lives of thousands of people. A novel dealing with the flood disaster in the Netherlands and its impact on the lives of the surviving is The Storm  by the Dutch writer Margriet de Moor.

The opening scene of The Storm  is set in Amsterdam on the morning of 31 January 1953. An omniscient third-person narrator tells the stories of the sisters Lidy and Armanda, the first twenty-three and married with a child, the latter twenty-one, shy and a bit jealous of everything her older sister has. When Lidy instead of Armanda sets out for the small town of Zierikzee several hours to the South disaster takes its course. It’s the night of a winter storm of unexpected power and Lidy is in its centre. After a long and desperate fight for survival she drowns in the floods. This short and thrilling period of Lidy’s life is set against the long and rather ordinary existence of Armanda in well-ordered circumstances that follows the events because Lidy’s body isn’t found. The worries of her family change into grief as the hopes to find her alive shrink. Before soon Armanda takes the place in Lidy’s little family, but for the rest of her days she feels like she were continuing her sister’s instead of her own life.

Reading The Storm  by Margriet de Moor has been an interesting and instructive pleasure as well as a sad and moving experience. And of course I highly recommend the book.

For the full review please click here to go to my blog Edith’s Miscellany.