“Primordial Soup is an unparalleled, physical and trippy story about the indescribable feeling that overcame the author during childbirth [...] this is autofiction that does not want to hide, not anymore [...] the beast is now set free, Primordial Soup fulfills the great promise – here you read Bregje Hofstede in all her glory” – NRC Handelsblad
“Furious, overwhelming, masterful. Reading this book is in itself a physical experience.” – Lize Spit
“A liberating book about femininity like no other author has ever written in Dutch.” – HUMO
“Hofstede opens Primordial Soup with the most phsyical scene you can imagine: childbirth. It's intense, it's evocative, it's honest [...] Hofstede writes about motherhood, physicality, sex, shame, friendship, love for people and for the universe, and about how they are all connected” – De Standaard
Based on her own traumatic experience of giving birth to her daughter (her hair even started falling out afterwards), Hofstede has found new words to describe the pain and vulnerability of childbirth. Amidst childbirth, life in the idyllic French countryside, and a relationship that is slowly drowning under the pressure of parenting, she is forced to truly embrace the physicality of her life and she does so fiercely and unapologetically. Primordial Soup is a ferocious ode to love and life.
“Something twisted within me, the way you twist some pens to make the tip come out – and something other than myself came to the opening of my mouth and eyes, something horrible popped out. It was screaming.
What if you almost accidentally reach through the membrane that envelopes your life like a protective layer, and there, you find a world that scares you, but that seems to suck you into itself?”
Primordial Soup is a lyrical reading experience that at times feels more like a trip than a novel. Through childbirth pain, rugby, medieval mystics, and the inner life of a sprouting carrot, it explores the longing for self-loss in a disenchanted age.