#RivetingReviews: Darcy Hurford reviews OFF-WHITE by Astrid Roemer, translated by Lucy Scott and David McKay

An internet search for the name ‘Vanta’ soon turns up a colour called Vantablack. A deep-black material invented by a technology company, Vantablack absorbs almost all the light that hits it, feeling uneasily vortex-like if looked at for too long.

Would Astrid Roemer (1947–2026) have appreciated Vantablack? Her novel about the Vanta family, set between Suriname and the Netherlands, plays out in a decolonising world where colour, and particularly skin colour, is extremely important. The matriarch Bee Vanta née Julienne is light-skinned, her husband Anton is black. Vanta meant ‘black’ at the plantation where his mother came from, we are told. One of his sons later reasons that ‘nothing blacker than Vanta exists; that’s just a necessary condition of the universe’. Necessary but not accepted by all, especially Bee. There are numerous incidences of her disapproval of darker skin tones, perhaps most strikingly when it comes to her own children: ‘Ethel’s older siblings, Winston and Louise, had come out a just barely respectable shade of light brown, but the skin on this one had gone a step too far towards an undesirable extreme.’

Internalised racism might be a better way of looking at it. ‘All of you are off-white, but her skin absorbs every wavelength of light’ Bee’s husband adds later in the same passage. The pages of Off-White are strewn with off-white things: some of the characters themselves, but also shells, stationery, nightshirts and even a mosquito net, its colour seeping into Bee’s dreams.

At the point the novel starts, Bee is increasingly unwell and coughing up blood, but still reluctant to admit to ill health. Her granddaughter Imker moves in with her. Her eldest granddaughter, Heli, has been sent to live with relatives in Utrecht after she is discovered to be in relationship with a married teacher. Bee’s other grandchildren, and her two daughters, Laura and Louise, are still in Suriname. The blurb on the back of the novel tells us it is set in 1966, although reading the novel, the period is something you sense rather than have spelt out to you: birth control pills are available, someone has recently bought a colour television and people still talk of escaping horrors in Europe a generation earlier.

Moving from the perspective of one character to another, Off-White is initially confusing to follow, as the text flits from the mind of one character to the next. It takes a while to realise that the ‘she’ at the start of a paragraph and the ‘she’ at the end of it might not be the same character. As a reader, you feel rather like a large fly buzzing about from person to person in a room. It gets easier as you read on and learn more about the characters, as each has their own style of voicing their thoughts, which comes across well in the translation.

The translation also conveys well the contradictions present in that time and place. Suriname might be peaceful, but it is a complicated society, and not just because of the mixture of heritages. Anton comments: ‘The Europeans abandoned their overseas plantations, but they forgot to liberate their overseas workers from the hell they lived in.’

The only character whose thoughts are relayed in the first person is Heli, who is discovering life in the Netherlands as a young adult. As Astrid Roemer emigrated from Suriname at the age of nineteen, Heli is surely the character closest to her own experience. Heli is caught between the excitement of the new – discovering a strange country, making friends, more actively considering herself as Surinamese; yet is still longing for home – at first for her lover (though the feeling passes) and later more for her grandmother. A bottle of almond syrup, a present from home, sits in the kitchen in Utrecht as a constant reminder of family. Its colour? Off-white.

Reviewed by Darcy Hurford

OFF-WHITE

Written by Astrid Roemer

Translated by Lucy Scott and David McKay

Published by Tilted Axis Press (2025)

June 2026 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

Darcy Hurford is a translator from Estonian, Finnish, German and Swedish. Originally from England, she is now based in Belgium.

Read Darcy Hurford’s #‎RivetingReview of ZOMBIELAND by Sørine Steenholdt, translated by Charlotte Barslund

Read Darcy Hurford’s #‎RivetingReview of THE LIVES AND DEATHS OF K. PENZA by Clare Azzopardi

Read Darcy Hurford’s #‎RivetingReview of KŪNAI by Tomas Vaiseta, Jurga Tumasonytė, Virginija Kulvinskaitė, Akvilė Kavaliauskaitė and Vidas Morkūnas

Read Darcy Hurford’s #‎RivetingReview of THE SINGULARITY by Balsam Karam

Read Darcy Hurford’s #‎RivetingReview of ÆDNAN. AN EPIC by Linnea Axelsson