A darkly funny, daring, and operatic novel that's one part The Corrections, one part The Producers
When Jacob and Maria welcome their future family members to their wedding at a gaudily decorated provincial hotel in an old-fashioned Dutch seaside town, they spare no expense. It's shaping up to be the party of the century, but almost immediately the edifice begins to crumble. Ludo has caught the clap, Liza's sex-addicted mother is lying about everything to everyone, and a shocking article in a local newspaper reveals that both Hans and Jacob are hiding very shady past.
Will the bride wise up? Can the groom resist Betsy, the daughter of the disgraced leader of the local Dutch Nazi party? Can Kati get away with cavorting with the hotel doorman? Skeletons fly out of closets with reckless abandon as The German Wedding careens toward its dramatic denouement.
It's the 1950s and a wedding is taking place at a Dutch seaside resort. With the war still reverberating in any people's minds, Liza's parents, wealthy German sausage manufacturers arriving from Cologne in their Mercedes, are sure to make an impression.
Pregnant Liza will be marrying Ludo Bagman, a cater¬er's son. Liza has allowed her pregnancy to be common knowledge so that she can sway her family, meanwhile Ludo is suffering from something other than the imminent joys of fatherhood.
A made-for-the-movies comedy reminiscent of Good Bye Lenin! in which every character masks his true motivations and the underlying tensions can only explode.
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The press:
"The novel often makes you roar with laughter ... Happiness is tantalisingly close but so narrowly missed. What makes this novel compelling is the extravagant and lavishly described preparations to the big party full of nervous to-ing and fro-ing by the participants who want to believe that everything will end well while the author and reader look down from their cosy seats onto the pandemonium and impending debacle. Waterdrinker is a natural born storyteller who never loses his grip on his readers." - DeVolkskrant
"German Wedding is an opera of longing for happiness and sex where every character receives an equal amount of attention .... The characters are Fellini-esque, provincial and colourful alike, they gambol around the 1950s theatrical stage which Pieter Waterdrinker has created for them." - DeTeIegraaf
"Waterdrinker is at his best in the picture he composes of a Dutch seaside resort in the postwar years, and in his descriptions of the needling townfolks who begrudge each other a life. His Zandvoort is a breeding ground of rumour and backbiting, envy and corruption - a universe reminiscent of the provincial town in Vestdijk's 1945 Pastorale." - NRC Handelsblad
Montagne Russe has been released at the Book Fair in Frankfurt in the first week of October. You can read a fragment here, in the English translation of Brian Doyle.
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