In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Jente Posthuma’s novel People with No Charisma marvelously mines the everyday world of a young Dutch girl in this coming-of-age tale.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“From award-winning Dutch author Posthuma comes this novella about a young Dutch girl growing up in a complex and unconventional family … funny and poignant … [A] thought-provoking novel about finding one’s place in the world.”
In her own words, here are Jente Posthuma and Sarah Timmer Harvey‘s Book Notes music playlists for the novel People with No Charisma:
MUSIC FOR OLD PEOPLE
Jente Posthuma’s Playlist for People With No Charisma
Fame (Irene Cara)
Like many debuts, People With No Charisma is a partly autobiographical coming-of-age story. At least, autobiographical in terms of theme, and the protagonist’s disco outfit. When I was about five, I had one just like it: shiny, bright pink shorts and a tank top with the word Disco printed on it in purple letters. I loved flashy clothes: dresses with enormous, puffed sleeves, patent leather shoes, though I never got those because my mother had good taste. But in that disco outfit I shone so brightly she couldn’t say no. A few years later, the TV series Fame was on, with Erica Gimpel as Coco Hernandez. Coco embodied for me what that disco outfit had once meant, something the show’s title song captured perfectly. I was going to “light up the sky like a flame” one day, and people would “see me and cry”. This is the charisma the mother in People With No Charisma so anxiously seeks, and also demands from her daughter, so insistently that the flame meant to light up the sky soon runs out of oxygen.
Jesus on the Mainline – Ry Cooder
The protagonist’s mother is deeply marked by the Jehovah’s Witness community she was excommunicated from. She is fundamentally insecure, afraid to let her guard down and consequently be rejected. Yet deep down she is strong. That strength reveals itself in a dominant presence, but also in a sharp sense of justice. She teaches her daughter not to judge people by their background or ethnicity, and she stands up, for instance, for the Turkish community in the region. She also speaks out in support of the Palestinians – an uncommon stance in the Netherlands of the 1990s, when Palestinians were generally portrayed by the media as terrorists, even more than they are today. The mother resists the kind of one-dimensional thinking that she herself was subjected to in the religiously fanatical circles of her youth. But she does judge her own daughter. And she also judges ugly people. And people with no charisma, whom she considers even worse than ugly people.
Years ago, when my own mother was dying, we played her favorite music for her. One of those songs was “Jesus on the Mainline”, in Ry Cooder’s version. No matter how ill she was, that song always brought her back to life. Even just before her death, it could lift her out of her morphine haze. Because of her background, similar to that of the mother in the book, she despised religion. But she loved gospel music, perhaps because those songs were far enough removed from the religious practice of the Jehovah’s Witnesses yet still touched something deep within her: a rooted spiritual feeling that was hers alone, or maybe a longing for the family she’d grown up in before it fell apart.
Zombie – The Cranberries
The chapter “I Knew No One” is set in Paris, where the protagonist moves after high school graduation to write a book. She meets no one and writes no book. I studied briefly in Paris myself at the same age. It was, by turns, an intensely happy and intensely lonely time. At first, I had a job as a waitress in a restaurant called La Poste, where I’d been hired solely on appearance—no one had asked about my skills or experience. I didn’t have either. And I barely spoke French, so customers had to repeat their orders at least three times before I understood them. On my third night, I was so nervous that I knocked over a candleholder, spilling wax all over a woman’s blazer, which in the end earned me a generous tip because the whole table felt sorry for me. Later, my colleagues told me that woman was the daughter of former president François Mitterrand. Those colleagues weren’t easy either. When I greeted the kitchen staff with a casual wave instead of giving everyone the customary two kisses, they turned cold and spent the rest of the evening making snide remarks. I had no idea how to relate to any of them. One waitress I worked with seemed to understand all that instinctively. That third night, after closing time, the song “Zombie” by The Cranberries was playing – the hit of the moment. Dolores O’Riordan lets her voice break in such an irritating way in that song. The waitress could imitate it perfectly and she even managed to dance sensually to it. The whole kitchen staff watched, mesmerized, and so did I. It was a ridiculous and admirable performance that, for some reason, I can still picture vividly thirty years later. In my mind, that awful Cranberries song has always stayed linked to that time in Paris, and to that restaurant, where, according to the owner, all sorts of celebrities came to eat, though I never saw any, but maybe that’s because I quit after the first week.
Sylvia’s Mother – Dr. Hook
In the chapter “The Best Years of My Bum” the eighteen-year-old protagonist takes a road trip through France with her father that doesn’t turn out that well. When I think of road trips and my own father, I think of summers from my childhood and the music he played in the car: The Band and Dr. Hook. Music for old people that I was drawn to as a child. I especially remember the song “Sylvia’s Mother” by Dr. Hook, because we all sang along at the top of our lungs—my father the loudest. He only had a good voice in the low range, and this song required the high one, but that didn’t stop him. “My Way” by Frank Sinatra he could actually sing well, but that comes up in another chapter (see Sarah’s playlist below).
The Boxer – Simon & Garfunkel
“The Boxer” is a song that lived in my head every single day for about fifteen years.. It started when I passed a street musician in Amsterdam playing “The Boxer” . The chorus lodged itself in my brain like a parasite. I don’t know why, just as I don’t know why I remember exactly where I was walking or what the musician looked like (he was wearing a red plaid shirt and had long, dark, curly hair tied back in a ponytail). When I wrote People With No Charisma, the song was still there, which is why it found its way into the book. Maybe I could have gone to see a doctor, but I know someone who once did that because she couldn’t get the tune from a famous Dutch children’s program out of her head. Her doctor advised her to wait and see, which is what Dutch GPs tend to say, whatever the complaint. I guess in my case the doctor was right, because I waited fifteen years, and the song was gone.
PASSING THROUGH SEVERAL MOODS
Sarah Timmer Harvey’s Playlist for People With No Charisma
My Way – Frank Sinatra
“My Way” appears multiple times in People With No Charisma because the main protagonist’s father learns to sing it, ultimately performing the song at his retirement party. It’s a song that seems to speak to a lot of people who grew up with Sinatra, but I’ve never been a Sinatra fan and the song used to irritate me more than anything. I had to listen to the song over and over again while translating the book, in order to paraphrase it. “My Way” became so tied to the book, that when I hear it, I automatically start picturing the main protagonist’s father and his hilariously tortured performance. The problem with this is that less than a month after translating those scenes I attended a funeral for a family member. At the end of the funeral, when the immediate family were gathered to say a final, private goodbye, Sinatra’s version of “My Way”, a firm favorite of the deceased, was playing on repeat over the sound system. I think I heard it at least six times while standing next to the coffin. Of course, I couldn’t help but think about People With No Charisma. Even though it was an incredibly sad moment, picturing the father in the book giving it his all as his daughter anxiously accompanies him on the piano almost made me laugh out loud. This would have been terribly inappropriate, as all of us were weeping. The whole scenario was one that Jente could have written herself, tragedy colliding with absurdity, the way it tends to in real life.
Laura – Bat for Lashes
“Laura” by Bat for Lashes has always made me think of an actress or showgirl who is no longer the center of attention but yearns for a time when she was. At first, the melodrama of the song hits you a little like the top note of a strong perfume, it’s a bit overwhelming. But when you pay attention to the lyrics, you realize that “Laura” is a hauntingly beautiful meditation on loneliness and regret. The song’s emotional journey mirrors that of the protagonist’s mother in People With No Charisma. While I was translating the book, the unnamed mother became my favorite character. At first, she is introduced to the reader as a somewhat hysterical former television actress who is obsessed with charisma and the career she once had. But through a series of short stories, we come to learn that she is the daughter of fanatical Jehovah’s Witnesses, who shame and disown her for her life choices. She goes on to forge a career as an actress, with a starring role in a prestige drama series which makes her famous enough to be recognized on the street. But when she takes a break to have a child, her career (which no one in her family ever seems to take seriously) never recovers. Years later, when the mother is cast in the ensemble of a small theater production, she seems poised for a comeback, but instead, we learn that she is later diagnosed with cancer. Just like “Laura” it’s easy to dismiss the protagonist’s mother as a drama queen, but Posthuma’s excavation of her suffering under patriarchal and religious systems is a masterclass in subtlety.
“No Excuses” – Childish Gambino ft. Ludwig Göransson & Kamasi Washington
“No Excuses” is the song I listened to most while translating People With No Charisma. It’s an epic collaboration between Childish Gambino (aka Donald Glover) and composer/producer Ludwig Göransson, two of my favorite songwriters coming together to work with the incredible Kamasi Washington. “No Excuses” is a lengthy song and I like the fact that it passes through several moods, almost like a short story. It’s about someone coming to terms with the end of a relationship or achieving a certain neutrality when thinking of their former lover. In People With No Charisma, the main protagonist has a relationship with a writer who has another girlfriend and a child. At various points in the book, she re-examines their relationship. The repetition of the phrase “cold love” throughout the song made me think about the writer and the way he shows up in his relationships. “No Excuses” is lush and complex, the perfect track to listen to while reading and translating or doing anything really.
Jente Posthuma is a Dutch writer whose first novel, People With No Charisma, was published in the Netherlands to critical acclaim. Her second novel, What I’d Rather Not Think About (2020) was shortlisted for the European Union Prize for Literature. The English-language translation by Sarah Timmer Harvey was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024. The translation rights of What I’d Rather Not Think About have been sold in more than fifteen countries. Posthuma’s third book Witch! Witch! Witch! (2023) is an idiosyncratic and witty retelling of three ancient Dutch sagas. Posthuma is currently working on a memoir.
Sarah Timmer Harvey is a translator and writer currently based in Woodstock, New York. She holds an MFA from Columbia University in New York and a BA from Southern Cross University. Reconstruction, their translation of stories written by the Dutch Surinamese writer Karin Amatmoekrim was published in 2020, and their translation of Thistle by Nadia de Vries was published in 2024. Sarah’s translations of Dutch-language poetry and prose have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. Born in Australia, she lived and worked in the Netherlands for fourteen years before moving to New York City in 2013.