People with No Charisma

After being shortlisted for last year’s International Booker Prize for the equal-parts funny, clever and heartbreaking novel What I’d Rather Not Think About, author and translator duo Jente Posthuma and Sarah Timmer Harvey have returned with a newly translated work that was actually Posthuma’s first novel. Originally written in Dutch in 2016, People with No Charisma is a humorous coming-of-age novel about grief, fraught parent-child relationships, and the identity crisis of being a young adult trying not to repeat your parents’ mistakes while having no other role models to look up to.

As in What I’d Rather Not Think About, Posthuma employs humour to balance the more sombre elements of People with No Charisma – the narrator’s mother’s terminal cancer, and her emotionally absent father – as well as a non-linear chapter structure to zoom in on distinct moments in her narrator’s life – her time in Paris trying to be a writer, a road trip from France to the Netherlands with her father, and her time in a psychiatric hospital postpartum.

I enjoyed seeing the origin of Posthuma’s style that I so loved in her sophomore work, and it’s interesting to see the evolution of the themes in her writing. Though perhaps not as narratively strong as her previously translated novel, Posthuma’s debut is a quirky, cleanly written and compulsively readable novel about the absurdity of life, the doubt-filled reality of adulthood and the echo of our childhoods and parents as we grow into our own selves.