Lewis, Herbert Clyde | Paperback / softback | 25-09-2019 | 9789086419999

With a beautiful and understanding wife, two healthy, promising children, a spacious apartment in New York City and a partnership in Pym and Bingley, Henry Preston Standish has nothing to be desired. Or has he?

When he gets sudden anxiety attacks, Standish decides to dispel the routine and make a cruise to Hawaii. He thoroughly enjoys the freedom, the sunsets over the ocean and the social life on board the ship. On the return trip he slips and falls overboard. In his lonely struggle in the water we are made familiar with his life and personality. Standish oversees his existence with the honesty that the situation imposes…

‘Overboard is a timeless masterpiece, on a par with Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich and Bunin’s Gentleman of San Francisco. Apart from the other properties that make Lewis’s story survive a comparison with the best and the brightest, it offers its own comfort. Not the comfort of insight, transcendence or redemption, but of shared loneliness and the power of humor.’

With a preface by Pauline van de Ven (Halewijn Literary oeuvre award). First reprint after 82 years in 2019 by Auteursdomein in an English edition and a Dutch translation after its original appearance in 1937 at Viking House, New York.