The Hairdresser's Son

International Dublin Literary Award–winning Gerbrand Bakker gives voice to the visceral power of family ties in a novel brimming with Knausgaardian detail

When his wife tells him she is pregnant, Cornelis packs his bags and boards a plane—a day later he is dead. Now grown, Simon roams the barbershop his father left him, honing razors and polishing mirrors in a shop marked FERMÉ. He sees his customers one by one, massaging scalps and shaving throats in an intimate, physical dance. There’s only one customer whose presence in Simon’s impeccable shop breaks this silent routine: the writer. Trimming the fine tips of the writer’s eyebrows, Simon loses himself in a parallel life—one where he lives and grows old with the writer, shaping a crewcut around an “old, weathered face.” The writer, looking for a life to fold into his next book, becomes entranced by the mystery surrounding Simon’s father—in the patterns of their conversation, Cornelis’s absence is renewed. As Simon begins to scour for the traces his father left behind, a carefully observed portrait of love and loneliness emerges. With subdued prose and bracing, sometimes pungent closeness, Gerbrand Bakker writes life itself into his characters.