Het dilemma van Otto Warburg - Eric de Brabander

HET DILEMMA VAN OTTO WARBURG 
Eric de Brabander

NOVEL

'Sometime in the past we all washed up on this island,' says Tito d'Estrées originating from the Dominican Republic, when he lifts his glass at a festive dinner party for the introduction of his future lover. Fate brought him and a Polish mother with daughter to Curaçao, then a Dutch colony, in order to build a new life.

Het dilemma van Otto Warburg unites European and Caribbean history of the twentieth century in a novel: a scientist carries out ground-breaking cancer research in Germany. The mother and daughter survive the horrors of Buchenwald and establish themselves on Curaçao, in order to take control of their lives. A young doctor breaks his specialists study and is eye-witness of inhuman atrocities in a French post colonial Africa. This son of a supporter of the Dominican dictator Trujillo takes after a violent incident in the district of Paris where he takes his  specialists study, the decision to go into exile on Curaçao

In shocking details Het dilemma van Otto Warburg sketches a picture of Germany’s final solution in the Second World War. The novel also relates on the blatant racism and the bloody suppression  under the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic.

The opposition between science and moral responsibility, human cruelty and victimization are brought together in a clever way in this novel. Can power and morality go together? Aren’t human action determined by the Darwinian survival of the fittest?

Het dilemma van Otto Warburg is a book to be read in a slow pace, put aside an to think about it.

AUTHOR
ERIC C. DE BRABANDER (1953) debuted in 2009 with Het hiernamaals van Doña Lisa [The afterlife of Doña Lisa]. This was followed by Hot Brazilian Wax en het Requiem van Arthur Booi [Hot Brazilian Wax en the requiem of Arthur Booi] in 2011 and De supermarkt van Vieira [The Supermarket of Vieira] in 2013. Het dilemma van Otto Warburg is his fourth novel.

PRODUCT SPECIFICATION
Dutch | paperback | 283 pages | Uitgeverij In de Knipscheer | Haarlem | 2016