A tender, unsparing memoir of a life braided between three languages and one stubborn city, Last Rites for Amersfoort traces Carmen Larsson's attempt to bless what can't be saved: a mother's failing body, a father's ferrying silences, and the medieval streets that held her first names. Born to a Swedish mechanic who loved long northern twilights and a Spanish nurse who kept a rosary tucked inside a tin of violet pastilles, Carmen grew up off the Eem near the Koppelpoort, where bike bells were liturgy and the bells of the Onze Lieve Vrouwetoren punctuated dinner. In classrooms in Amersfoort-Noord, she learned to conjugate verbs she spoke at home to different gods—Du, tú, jij—while nuns at Sint Franciscus Xaveriuskerk pressed a thumb to her brow on the Feast of Saint Lucy. Her mother, Marisol, demanded crisp hems and perfect Dutch; her father, Anders, calibrated the world with grease on his hands and ABBA on the radio. There were winters of erwtensoep and rookworst, Midsommar saffron buns mailed from an aunt in Uppsala, and summer months in Jerez de la Frontera with a grandmother who swore by garlic soup and flamenco whispered after midnight.
As Carmen aged out of the old city and into an art program in Rotterdam, painting sets at the Schouwburg and falling for a sound engineer named Bas, her Dutchness hardened and the other cords slackened. She chased studio deadlines, weekend gigs, and the relief of being known by only one name. When Marisol's hands began to tremble and her speech thinned into air—early-onset Parkinson's with dementia—Carmen came home, learning pill schedules and night care, learning again how to pray. Between bus 3 to Vathorst and the hospice near the Eemhaven, she stitched a new liturgy from ordinary things: a chipped Delft plate, a cassette of Camarón de la Isla, a Lutheran hymn hummed into a Spanish lullaby. In pages steeped in incense and canal light, salt herring and tortilla española, she writes with humour and bite about paperwork and pilgrims, stubbornness and surrender, and how a city can be both cradle and witness. Last Rites for Amersfoort becomes a procession through memory—past the perfume counter at the V&D-that-was, past Bas's empty flat, into a sacristy where a priest named Pieter whispers the final blessing in Dutch and Spanish—until Carmen understands that departure is its own rite, and that to love a parent, a place, and a self divided by borders is to keep walking after the bells go quiet.
