Spitzen draws on the tango-craze that swept the Netherlands in the early 2000s, following the news that crown-prince Willem Alexander was to marry a glamorous blonde from Buenos Aires. Han Bijman is a middle-aged bachelor with an administrative job at Shell. On the advice of his tango-mad upstairs neighbour he takes lessons and goes to a dance event, which brings him together with the beautiful, sexy, but obviously unreliable Esther. Their relationship goes through all kinds of twists and turns of bandoneon-related passion and deceit, with dull Han almost (but perhaps not quite) catapulted into the role of the jealous Latin lover. Fun, as far as it goes... ( )

Op een dansavondje ontdekt een man dat de danslessen hem onvoldoende hebben voorbereid.

I wasn't blown away by this short novella. I generally like Rosenboom, but somehow this just didn't speak to me, and I never really became involved with the main characters - I really just found them slightly annoying and their adventures uninteresting.

The book tells the story of a middle aged man who finds his first love, but soon realizes that she is in love with someone else. Though at first he finds it exciting to know that she is deceiving the other man to be with him, he soon becomes jealous and unhappy with the situation. In the end, the relationship doesn't last.

I found the story to be quite predictable and not very enticing. It's really a pretty common story - man falls in love with woman, woman turns out to not be as faithful as he would like, and in the end they break up. Somehow I wasn't really interested in the story or the characters. The man, Han, could have been an amiable character, but in stead I mainly found him annoying, lying and deceiving as much as the woman does.
Though the writing style is nice, the story just really isn't very special or intriguing. ( )

The text on the back of the cover did not reveal anything about the contents. Only that at some point a small pair of shoes would appear.
Maybe that is why I left it to rest for so long on the shelf.

But, spring cleaning is upcoming or (almost) over and I found it again. This time I decided to start reading right away and I was surprized.

Han, the main character in the book feels like he has failed in everything he has ever done. He never finished his univeristy studies, has never been with a woman, loves to dance (tango) but is afraid to ask a woman to dance and therefore he often has no partner to dance with, let alone someone he regularly goes to dance meetings with.

His neighbour upstairs also loves to tango. She even travels to Buenos Aires for a couple of weeks and enthousiastically tells about it.
Han does not go anywhere, but to the tango meetings. Suddenly he meets a woman there, Esther. They dance two dances together and when the evening ends, she asks him if he wants to be her partner at a milonga course. He accepts her offer. And with that the whole carrousel starts.

Han and Esther become lovers. At first al looks well, but when more is revealed about Esther through the stories that she tells Han about herself, the more suspicious I got. Not Han at first, he is a bit green, remember.
But, despite that, he also feels that things aren't adding up and when she tells him about her boyfriend in India, who comes over, he realizes that the realtionship is not without complications. When the day of arrival of the boyfriend comes closer, Esther even doesn't want to see him anymore.

When the boyfriend arrives, Esther breaks her own rule of not going to see Han anymore. She goes to visit him and tells Han that he's very jealous. That she doens't remember him that way.
Understandable, but.... She tells her boyfriend, that she met Han. So she's playing with both men at the same time. And, in the very end it turns out, that she has already met someone else, someone to start the whole thing over again.

I liked the short story. It has 92 pages, but despite that, the story is complete. Told what needed to be told, in a way that was very satisfactory to me. A little bit of a mistery, which made me think, but also very human like, so very recognizable.
I should have read it before, but, like I said, I had no idea where the book would take me, once I would have started. And, although I like surprizes, I do need some kind of hint, an idea of the place I'll travel to by the guidelines of the book.
( )

Boekenweekgeschenk 2004. Man ontmoet tijdens tangoles een vrouw met een gecompliceerde verhouding. Een driehoeksverhouding ontstaat. Een paar spitzen brengen de man uiteindelijk de verlossing om uit deze verhouding te komen. ( )