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Surreality reigns at the St Ossius nursing home. Claiming bowel trouble, Mr Beenhakker shits with suspicious satisfaction into his doctor’s hands, while Alie Vermeulen attempts suicide by swallowing denture cleaner. In Dancing with Mister D (Doubleday, £9.99, ISBN 0 385 40798 X), Dutch doctor Bert Keizer takes a long look—sardonic and compassionate by turns—at life for the dying. References to gallows humorists Kafka and Beckett pepper a text that veers from the placebo effect and the absence of science in medical practice to graphic, often grotesque, accounts of euthanasia, postmortems and fatal illnesses. But death is the star here. The medical brutality—an anchor, perhaps, in the ebb and flow of dying, death, bereavement—never outweighs Keizer’s understanding of how hard it is to go down gracefully with the ship.