By Niña Weijers
Translated by Hester Velmans
2017. Hardcover and Paperback. 304 pages. Ebook also available.
$29.95 (hc) | 9780997818420
$14.95 (pb) | 9780997818437
Dutch author Niña Weijers took the world of European literature by storm in 2014 with her debut novel The Consequences, which quickly sold over 20,000 copies in Holland and garnered critical praise for its maturity and ambition.
Using deft and captivating prose, Weijers tells the story of Minnie Panis, a young and talented conceptual artist, as she navigates love affairs, her unexpected success in the art world, and her relationship with an emotionally distant mother. Beginning with Minnie’s near-death experience falling through the ice during her ultimate artwork, Weijers takes readers on a rollercoaster ride as Minnie uncovers the truth behind her premature birth. The doctor who saves her life, twice, enters Minnie into his clinic, whose motto All the fish needs it to get lost in the water helps her arrive at the border of life’s ebb, where meaningful art and revelations occur. An intimate, often humorous exploration of the intertwining cycles of death, rebirth and coincidence, The Consequences is a Bildungsroman that echoes far beyond the last page.
PRAISE
Minnie Panis is a Dutch artist of growing international reputation. One day, she opens Vogue and finds nearly nude photographs of herself featured in a fashion spread. She did not agree to pose for these pictures, and yet she instantly knows where they came from: a photographer she'd been sleeping with had betrayed her and photographed her asleep; had probably drugged her to capture these images. Thus begins one of the central storylines in Niña Weijers's remarkable first novel...
– Olga Zilberbourg, National Book Critics Circle
Weijers’ prose is sharp, intimate, and curious.
– The Riveter
Even as she remains enigmatic, Minnie is a very well presented strong character, and Weijers' unusual life and art story is engaging throughout: she knows how to spin and tell a story. Thoroughly enjoyable and agreeably provocative.
– Complete Review
A thoughtful and compelling book that kept me thinking and reflecting.
– Words Without Borders
Niña Weijers’s brilliant debut novel The Consequences is in no way a genre mystery (there is no crime, no one is killed, there is no villain), [yet] Weijers often borrows standard cues of suspenseful plotting as the story progresses. [...] The mystery unfolds as an odd journey of self-discovery in which the lead character comes to know herself through a fascination with erasure. [...] A sensitive and erudite exploration of the tangled relationships between synchronicity, identity, life, and art.
– Los Angeles Review of Books
This novel is a true must-read, and Weijers is an author all literate readers should discover. [...] The Consequences is an astonishing book, shimmering with wit, wisdom, and beauty.
– Rain Taxi
Weijers masterfully slips back and forth between the (temporal) present and various pasts in Minnie’s life, elaborating on her disappearances and her sadness. ... Weijers’ literary inspiration comes from Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, but she leaves Beckett’s futility behind to deliver a deeply compelling search for meaning that at times turns on the slightest connections—like the fleeting nature of life itself.
– Riot Material Magazine
In this novel, tingling with ambition and fascinating ideas, the life and art of the main character revolve around loss, existence and disappearance. A determined tone characterizes this crazy book.
– NRC Handelsblad – 5 stars
The novel grates and creaks, and is loaded with questions, leaps and side paths, but that is one of its charms. Up to the last disturbing sentence the writer holds the reader in her manipulative grip.
– De Groene Amsterdammer
Niña Weijers’ remarkable, inventive novel depicts a contemporary conceptual artist at the height of her fame whose blasé art project has unintended consequences. Weijers invokes Kurt Vonnegut in the course of the narrative, and this novel shares Vonnegut’s sense of how things can be simultaneously real and absurd. Movies and books notoriously fail to capture the social and spiritual atmosphere of the contemporary art world, but Weijers nails it. Her book is beautifully written, surprising and often profound.
– Chris Kraus
An impressive novel on the art of creative living or the creative and destructive vital force of being an artist.
– Maarten Asscher
Niña Weijers took her place, with her first book, among the considerable group of female authors whose names have been established for so long: Hella Haasse, Anna Enquist, Margriet de Moor. Her book, The Consequences, attempts something that is not easy, and succeeds. A person thinks exhaustively about herself yet does not become boring. She writes about what she’s doing and you want to know all about it because it’s so vividly told. The temptation not to exist, to disappear from the world you’re walking around in, the art you come upon and live with – when you write it down it sounds like heavy going; when you read it it’s light. So read it.
– Cees Nooteboom
Minnie Panis is a conceptual artist whose near-death experience during an installation convinces her to seek psychological help. But is the doctor she’s chosen a helper, or a gateway to another dimension? ‘The day Minnie Panis vanished from her own life for the third time. . .’ You’ll be hooked as I was if you pick up this serious yet humor-filled examination of a life perhaps too-well examined—but what would you expect of an artist?
– Bethanne Patrick, Literary Hub
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Niña Weijers (Nijmegen, 1987) studied literary theory in Amsterdam and Dublin. She has published short stories, essays and articles in various literary magazines, such as Das Magazin, De Gids and De Revisor. In 2010 she won the writing competition Write Now!. She is a regular contributor to the weekly magazine De Groene Amsterdammer, and an editor of De Gids.
Her debut novel The Consequences (De consequenties) was published in May 2014. It won the Anton Wachter Prize 2014 for best first novel, the Opzij Feminist Literature Prize, the Lucy B. & C.W. van der Hoogt Prize, and was shortlisted for the Libris Prize and the Golden Boekenuil, the two most important Dutch and Flemish literary awards. So far, it has sold over 20.000 copies.
Foreign Language publications: English (Doppelhouse Press, 2017), French (Actes Sud, Fall 2016), German (Suhrkamp, August 2016) and Czech (Kniha Zlín, 2017).
Hester Velmans is an award-winning translator specializing in contemporary Dutch and French literature, and is the author of several popular children’s books.