Coquette Vrouw

Ina Damman appears to have everything: a husband named Egbert, a child, a respectable life in early twentieth-century Amsterdam. But beneath her carefully maintained charm lies a woman starving for something she cannot name. Each flirtation promises transcendence, a momentary escape from the suffocating ordinariness of bourgeois domesticity. She tells herself this time it might be real love. It never is. The nervous excitement fuels her writing, makes her feel alive, but leaves her perpetually more hollow than before. Her greatest enemy is not societal morality, though it constrains her at every turn. Her greatest enemy is herself: the endless wanting, the inability to be satisfied, the way she keeps choosing small excitements over genuine contentment. Carry van Bruggen, writing in the tradition of psychological realism that would influence generations of novelists, offers no easy redemption. What she offers instead is something more valuable: a clear-eyed portrait of a woman caught between what she's supposed to want and what she actually needs.