The Detour

The combination of an isolated Welsh farm and an anxious and secretive protagonist make for an unsettling, quietly mysterious novel. The woman at the centre of The Detour is a Dutch translations studies lecturer, who has run away from her family in Holland and moved to Wales where she lives alone in a rented farmhouse. Along with the house, she unwillingly takes on responsibility for a gaggle of geese that gradually begin to disappear.
The Detour isn’t the kind of book that will appeal to lovers of action-packed plots. In fact there is an eerie stillness to the story, which lends itself perfectly to the descriptive nature of the writing. I loved the direct, but intricate prose style, which captures the details of the rural landscape and the Dutch woman’s physicality in such a matter-of-fact way, but is simultaneously rich with delicate detailing. This is reinforced by the snapshot-like chapters, which offer fleeting glances into both the daily activities of the woman and her past in Holland.
I found it really interesting that at the centre of this translated novel was the theme of translation itself. The protagonist is a translator, not only in her work (as well as teaching translation, she is working on translating the poems of Emily Dickinson) but also in the sense that she has moved to a country where the first language is not her own. By explaining her difficulty in understanding those around her and her conversion of poems from one language to another Bakker illustrates perfectly how excruciatingly hard translation must be.
I must say that I did enjoy this novel immensely, there’s nothing loud-mouthed and cocky about this book, it is a quiet, well-crafted, clever novel that, I get the feeling, may be rather hard to forget.
Kate Double (Thu 9th Feb 2012)