‘You could translate the title The Song of Stork and Dromedary as The Song of Meaning and Sophistry. In other words, the title is a metaphor for life ...’
Anjet Daanje, the author of The Song of Stork and Dromedary, has been called a ‘formidable present-day contender’ for the Nobel Prize in Literature by The Wall Street Journal. In this article, translated from Dutch by David McKay, Daanje explains the philosophy behind the title of her multi-award-winning new novel.
The stork in this novel signifies that people impose a structure on everything they see and then find patterns and meaning in that structure. That’s how human brains cope with information that reaches them through the senses. If your brain didn’t do that, you would drown in the unimaginable chaos, and your life would hardly be worthy of the name.
To give meaning to their lives, people need a rock, something solid to hold onto, and once they’ve found that rock, they build their reality on it. People often ignore evidence that could destroy their rock, tying themselves in all kinds of knots to maintain their beliefs. That’s what the dromedary stands for: sophistry. In each of the eleven chapters of the novel, the protagonist clings to their rock, which is something different in each case: religion, superstition, love, fantasy, literature, conspiracy theories, science, pseudoscience, etc.
So you could translate the title The Song of Stork and Dromedary as The Song of Meaning and Sophistry. In other words, the title is a metaphor for life.
‘The Song’ contains a torrent of stories and details, just like life itself, and every reader can find their own way through the novel, just as they can in life, making their own connections and assigning them their own meanings, and thus discovering their own rocks that give meaning to the world inside the novel. Above all, each reader can try to assemble their own Eliza May Drayden out of the stories in the book, depending on how credible it is to them that other characters’ lives re-enact her story. Perhaps you believe that the connections you find in the novel have a deeper meaning, and therefore believe in a higher power and life after death. Or perhaps you put more faith in a scientific explanation, based on the incomprehensible nature of Time. Or do you think it’s all coincidence, that life consists entirely of chaos?
In short, there are countless ways of reading ‘The Song’, and hence of giving meaning to the book. But just as the different stories in each chapter gain new meaning because together they form a novel, the sum total of all those reading experiences has yet another meaning: namely, that life has the significance you give it yourself, and so we must try to be understanding of each other’s ways of living.
Inspired by the life and work of Emily Brontë, this masterful, multi-award-winning book — acclaimed as the best Dutch novel published this century — pulls readers into a narrative that redefines time itself.
In the early 1800s, in Yorkshire, Eliza May Drayden and her sisters live far from the public eye, devoted to their shared love of reading and writing books. When, after dozens of rejections, Eliza May’s only novel, Haeger Mass, is finally published, it’s labelled as ‘ghastly’ and ‘immoral’. Over time, however, it is embraced by generations of readers as a masterpiece, and tales about its mysterious, reclusive author take on a life of their own.
In eleven extraordinary chapters, the story of Eliza May — both before and after her death — unfolds: through the tales of people who met her; her sister’s letters; her biographers’ words; the pages of a mysterious notebook; and the lives that become intertwined with hers, even centuries later.
In The Song of Stork and Dromedary, Anjet Daanje has crafted an absorbing literary mystery and an unforgettable meditation on love, life, loss, and the inexplicable nature of time. As the Brontës themselves did, Daanje shows us that storytelling is our only way to transcend death.
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An extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination.
Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognises Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn’t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand’s biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne’s stories about him. But how can he be certain that she’s telling the truth?
In The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatised man who has lost his identity. When Amand comes to doubt Julienne’s word, the reader is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion that only the greatest works of literature can achieve.
Anjet Daanje writes novels, short stories, and screenplays. Her breakthrough novel, The Remembered Soldier, won the Netherlands’ 2020 F. Bordewijk Prize and the Best Book of Groningen Prize. The Song of Stork and Dromedary won the 2023 Libris Literature Prize, the most prestigious award for Dutch literature, and the Boekenbon Prize, the Netherlands’ other major literary award — the first time that the Libris and Boekenbon prizes have been won by the same book. It has since been licensed in 13 languages and has sold over 100,000 copies in the Netherlands. Scribe has licensed North American rights in its edition to Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
David McKay is an award-winning translator of Dutch fiction and nonfiction. Born and educated in the United States, he has lived in and around The Hague since 1997.
