The dutch writer Tommy wieringa takes us into a true story about those children made stowaways of the XNUMXst century. People of any age looking for a future denied. The old notion of borders as that ultimate nonsense, when one is able to deny the right to life simply by crossing an invisible threshold under the shadow of flags.
It is true that the issue is not to be prudish and point to an assignment to mafias that are even worse than the cynical positions of the countries receiving souls on the run. But the problem cannot pass for being an assumed inertia, a gap in the news, a moral asepsis that makes us insensitive to everything. Novels like this address that realism more than as a genre as a chronicle of our days.
A ferry crosses the Strait of Gibraltar in the direction of Spanish lands. On deck, two young friends return home after a rough holiday in Morocco. These Dutch women of Moroccan origin have wanted to know the homeland of their parents without being aware that it was not so easy to travel alone in a country dominated by men. Now they try to enjoy the high sky while the strong wind churns the waves, but they cannot stop thinking about the boy they have hidden in the trunk of the rental car: in the dark, locked in the hole that used to be the spare wheel. They only know his name and that he harbors the same dream as the girls' parents: Europe.
The death of Murat Idrissi puts a name and surname to one of the many anonymous tragedies that, when the good weather arrives, we see on the news. Based on a real case, this short but intense novel, nominated for the Man Booker International Award, is a heartbreaking song against racism and the abysmal inequality between cultures in the same country and between two lands, two continents irretrievably separated by just a few kilometers apart. Water.
You can now buy the novel "The Death of Murat Idrissi", by Tommy Wieringa, here: