NINA WEIJERS READS FROM HER DEBUT THE CONSEQUENCES WITH MEREDITH ALLING

The Consequences (DoppelHouse Press)

Dutch author Niña Weijers took the world of European literature by storm in 2014 with her debut novel The Consequences, which has sold over 30,000 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 is 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 for The Consequences

“The Consequences attempts something that's not easy, and succeeds. A person thinks about herself exhaustively, yet doesn’t become a bore. 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, Award-winning author of The Following Story and Rituals

“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 (Netherlands) 

“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 (Netherlands)

“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, author of I Love Dick, and Aliens and Anorexia

Niña Weijers studied literary theory in Amsterdam and Dublin. She has published short stories, essays and articles in various Dutch literary magazines. 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 first published in Dutch in May 2014. It won the 2014 Anton Wachter Prize 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 30,000 copies, and has been published in five languages.

Meredith Alling is a writer based in Los Angeles. Her debut collection of short stories, Sing the Song, is available from Future Tense Books (futuretensebooks.com).