About the Book
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZEA FINALIST FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE
On a Woman's Madness tells the story of Noenka, a courageous Black woman trying to live a life of her own choosing. When her abusive husband of just nine days refuses her request for divorce, Noenka flees her hometown in Suriname, on South America's tropical northeastern coast, for the capital city of Paramaribo. Unsettled and unsupported, her life in this new place is illuminated by romance and new freedoms, but also forever haunted by her past and society's expectations. Strikingly translated by Lucy Scott, Astrid Roemer's classic queer novel is a tentpole of European and post-colonial literature. And amid tales of plantation-dwelling snakes, rare orchids, and star-crossed lovers, it is also a blistering meditation on the cruelties we inflict on those who disobey. Roemer, the first Surinamese winner of the prestigious Dutch Literature Prize, carves out postcolonial Suriname in barbed, resonant fragments. Who is Noenka? Roemer asks us. "I'm Noenka," she responds resolutely, "which means Never Again."
About the Author :
In 1966, at the age of 19, Astrid Roemer emigrated from Suriname to the Netherlands. She identifies herself as a cosmopolitan writer. Exploring themes of race, gender, family, and identity, her poetic, unconventional prose stands in the tradition of authors such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. She was awarded the P.C. Hooft Prize in 2016, and the three-yearly Dutch Literature Prize (Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren) in 2021.
Review :
"A modern classic set in Suriname and lyrically rendered into English for the first time, On a Woman's Madness is a testament to both the resilience of queer lives that exist everywhere and everytime and the alchemy of literary translation where a perfect book meets its perfect translator."--International Booker Prize Judges
"In prose full of sensory description...and evocative recurrent images of snakes and orchids, [Roemer] follows her young protagonist, Noenka, from a brief marriage into a voyage of sexual and existential self-discovery....Noenka--young, queer, Black, Jewish, and neither married nor fully single--is in a precarious position, and real danger seems always to be around the bend, alongside the 'incurable illness of True Love.' By the end, On a Woman's Madness is plainly a love story, but one that reminds readers that, more often than not, our social conditions matter just as much as the company we keep." --Lily Meyer, NPR
"Difficult, fragmentary, gorgeous, and at times unpredictable...The novel is saturated with pain, drama, pleasure, and violence, which may rightly invite comparison to classics by Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, although Roemer's writing style is remarkable in its own right....The world Noenka lived in didn't have room for her kind of love or personhood, and she suffered for it. Yet somehow, by the end of the novel, Roemer's heroine hasn't abandoned the love she's suffered for. This seems miraculous, and it is but one reason to be thankful for this long-overdue translation of one of her most important works." --Harvard Review
"A stunning tale of love and survival anchored by Noenka's unflagging honesty and Roemer's embrace of the contradictions, ambiguity, and mystery that characterize real life...The miracle of Roemer's novel is not only the beauty with which she narrates Noenka's life but also the strength of spirit displayed by her characters. Finding beauty and love within any imprisonment is a glimpse of the divine in a person. Roemer's novel glimmers with this holy light even in the darkest night."--Elizabeth Gonzalez James, Southwest Review
"In On a Woman's Madness, freedom is not a place but an activity, a kind of restlessness that never settles into safety but still insists upon the necessity of its seeking...The appearance of Roemer's second novel in English is a major hallmark for the study of contemporary Afrodiasporic literature, and Lucy Scott is to be commended for tackling Roemer's unsettled and often unsettling prose." --Nicholas Rinehart, Words Without Borders
"Roemer makes her English-language debut with this classic of queer Black literature....As Roemer pushes at the boundaries of the senses, she melds biting postcolonial social commentary with a lush dreamscape. Scott's translation is a gift to English-language readers." --Publishers Weekly
"On a Woman's Madness, like its narrator, refuses to be one thing or another, but lives in the rich realm that lies between binaries, where awe and astonishment thrive. Here, memory and desire, like the serpents who dwell within Roemer's pages, lurk and coil and crush and consume us. I don't know if I've ever read a novel that so overwhelmed me with pulsing, coursing life." --Kent Wascom, author of The New Inheritors
"The legacy of colonialism and slavery affects both Noenka and her nation, Suriname, as she fights to escape her brutish husband and stay with the one she truly loves....The dialogue flows as if from another world: grand and old-fashioned. Noenka's story unfolds in similar fashion, with dramatic twists and terrible revelations." --Foreword Reviews
"The atmosphere of a thriller, combined with the lyrical description of a woman's inner world, makes On a Woman's Madness a most exceptional book." --Trouw
"The whole book is a headlong search for identity, the identity of all women. Spellbinding prose, like rampant vegetation." --Inge Meijer, Literair Nederland
"Its wealth of sights, scents, and ... and its sensuality, exceptional in Dutch literature, make On a Woman's Madness a great literary achievement, linked thematically to Louis Couperus...and stylistically to Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude." --Judges' report, P.C. Hooft Prize 2016
"With her novels, plays and poems she occupies a unique position in the Dutch-language literature landscape. Her work is unconventional, poetic and experimental and succeeds in linking recent major history and its themes (corruption, tension, guilt, colonization and decolonization) to minor history." --the jury of the Prize of Dutch Literature 2021
"'The Dutch Caribbean literature of the twenty-first century is dominated by female authors. Many of the new female prose writers modeled themselves on the woman who like no other set her seal on the last quarter of the twentieth century: Astrid Roemer." --Professor Michiel van Kempen in Women's Writing from the Low Countries 1880-2010
