LOVE LIFE RAY KLUUN

Dan and Carmen are hip, healthy and wealthy. They have their own companies, plenty of money and friends and are the proud parents of one year-old Luna ...They live the cool life in Amsterdam, until beautiful and optimistic Carmen is diagnosed with breast cancer. With that their world transforms into a roller-coaster ride of doctors and hospitals. As his way of coping, the hedonistic Dan faithfully accompanies Carmen to her chemo and radiotherapy treatments, but spends his nocturnal hours crazily immersed in the nightlife and women of Amsterdam and Miami. "Love Life" is the account of a relationship and a terminal illness, devoid of fake sentiment and told with humour and deep humanity. And it is very much an ode to love. "A wonderful novel about courage, helplessness and real love". ("Cosmopolitan Germany").

In the Dutch Kluun's brutal roman à clef, Dan and Carmen van Diepen are successful professionals in their 30s, raising their young daughter in Amsterdam's suburbs while still partying zestfully, when Carmen's diagnosis with an aggressive form of breast cancer puts her life on hold. Dan, who narrates, soon rages against the incompetence and insensitivity of the doctors treating Carmen, and the couple alternate between manic joy and terror as they realize Carmen won't live to see their daughter, Luna, grow up. At the same time, confirmed club hound Dan pursues numerous infidelities, comments on his greatly diminished affection for his stricken wife and offers few apologies. As Carmen grows increasingly ill, they learn to forgive each other's faults, and Dan takes on the heavy burden of Carmen's decline. The final chapters find Carmen, Dan and their colorful cohort of yuppie friends pulling together to support Carmen's decision to end her life with dignity. Kluun's novel was a bestseller in Europe, and the translation is poignant, humorous and very graphic on the cancer. Kluun's take on marriage may be too European for the States, but his lacerating portraits of the medical establishment will certainly hit home. (Aug.)
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Ray Kluun (Kluun to his friends) was a marketing man in a previous life. In 2001 he lost his 36-year-old wife to cancer. Kluun took his daughter Eva (then three years old) to Australia and wrote Love Life, which became a massive word-of-mouth bestseller in Europe, selling 500,000 copies. He has also written a work of satire, Help, I Got My Wife Pregnant, and a bestselling sequel to Love Life, entitled The Widower, which describes the journey through Australia with his daughter in a camper van as they deal with their loss.