De lijkfigurant

Dion Dekkers received a grant to write a new novel. De lijkfigurant is a tragicomic story about Nicolien, an unemployed thirty-something who discovers her calling in playing a corpse on television. We follow her attempts to identify with the impossible (death) while her meddlesome mother, her lover, and the social services all breathe down her neck. Her entire life seems to have been a preparation for this sacred vocation: all the days she lay motionless in bed, all the jobs that paralysed her. Nicolien devotes herself to corpse-acting with the fanaticism of a method actor. What follows is a poetic exploration of the other side and of the borderlands of human life, which ultimately brings her into contact with a video artist and documentary filmmaker. In preparing for an unusual crime reconstruction, Nicolien increasingly takes the place of the deceased woman. What does it mean to “resemble” or “appear as,” in the double sense of the word: to become the other, the otherness?

Dion writes prose and essays, often about eccentrics who lose something. A sense; another person; a world. And find it again in a different way. He studied literary studies and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, with a special interest in (post-)phenomenology. After two fruitful years at the Schrijversvakschool in Amsterdam, he is now working on his debut novel. His work has appeared in, among others, Kluger Hans and Tirade.