God's Gym

Leon de Winter

This is a book by Leon de Winter who's books have been made into movies quite a few times (The Hollywood Sign, Hoffman's Hunger, Looking for Eileen) none of which I have seen by the way. This is the first de Winter I read and maybe I will try another one just to compare them and see if he does all this stuff in all his books.

The book is about Joop Koopman a Dutch scenario writer in LA. The book starts promissing but after a few chapters all kind of different storylines start to come in which makes the book more of a mix of short stories about the same character rather than a coherent novel.

Storyline 1: He loses his daughter in a motor accident and her hart is transplanted, he want's to meet the person who has his daughters hart, problems there.

Storyline 2: God (Godzilla) the guy who was on the motorbike with his daughter feels so guilty he want's to dedicate the rest of his life to the father in return for losing his daughter. He also goes bankrupt.

Storyline 3: Joop Koopman is asked by an old Jewish classmate who is now a big shot with the Mossad, to get in contact with a Dutch Morrocan guy who is an alleged terrorist (duh).

Storyline 4: Joop meets his old love Linda after 30 years or so and she is completely into buddism. They get back together.

Storyline 5: Linda's Buddist Guru is the alleged reincarnation of Joop's grandfather who died in a German concentration camp and seems to have left a whole lot of money in a Swiss bankaccount. Ofcourse there is a scam and Linda and the Guru vanish with the 2 million $ in cash after Joop has signed the papers.

Everybody still with me? Unfortunately de Winter is not able to convince me of the use of all these storylines especially because some of them keep tangling loose after the book has finished. The daughter/God part would have made a very nice book on it's own a lot thinner but that would have been enough. All the rest just doesn't add anything for me.