Hope without action falls apart

“I gave them what they wanted. A man who has a bad smell from his mouth and who is a bit sexist. Which is how people see me.”

Tommy Wieringa does not shy away from saying things as he sees them. Speaking about Nirwana (Nirvana), his latest novel, he jokes that its protagonist, Hugo Adema, needed a ‘deus ex machina’ to investigate his grandfather’s past. That intervention comes in the form of Tommy Wieringa himself, whom Adema encounters in Amsterdam.

Nirwana traces three generations of a Dutch family. The novel is inspired by the real-life Heerema family, whose story begins with the sons of a former Nazi collaborator and develops into an influential oil and gas empire through offshore platforms built for Shell. Although the family in the novel is fictional and called Adema, Wieringa makes no secret of its real-life inspiration.

“I wanted to write about something complex, that we are heating up the world like a combustion engine. I wanted to write about when and how it happened.” A subject which might be better suited to an essay or manifesto. Instead, he chose to write about time itself, with a three-generation family providing the vehicle.

In conversation with Wieringa, Nicolò Porcelluzzi engages deeply with the novel, posing intricate questions. But once the writer gets going, it is difficult to stop him. Charming the audience, interviewer and translator alike, Wieringa moves effortlessly from his fiction to broader concerns about fossil fuels and political power.

“Authoritarian powers in the world fund their regimes with oil and gas. We have to understand this and cut them off from the source.” He also discusses the essay that grew out of Nirwana, Hope without Optimism. Its central message is direct and clear. “Hope without action falls apart. We have to take action.”

And action is something Wieringa takes seriously. Beyond writing, he has raised funds and worked with a Dutch NGO supporting Ukraine on the front lines, as well as planting trees.

As Wieringa makes clear, his work is only just getting started.