The brevity of this novel seems to enable tight control of the environmental detail of Morocco and Spain where the drama unfolds and focus on a few unremarkable but essential signifying characters. The protagonists are a pair of fairly decadent young women who play out a devastating development in their already precarious life footholds. These "fortunate" are contrasted with the fate of the abject victim.Although the subject matter may be a bit dark for some I love the texture and the sense of purpose.

Little gem of a novella with a natural kind of suspense. Two Dutch Moroccan girls with a rather spoilt lifestyle, who broke free from the suffocating chains of their traditional immigrant Berber parents, go on a holiday in Morocco in a hired audi 4. A small accident costs them their money. Penniless, and eager to get back home, they reluctantly agree to smuggle a village boy into Spain in the boot of their car. A Moroccan fixer promises them it can’t go wrong.

That’s when you know everything will go wrong. Thouraya is a wild, party girl; Ilham is shy and reluctant. When the ferry berths in Spain, they discover the boy in the booth has died, suffocated. Their fixer takes off. Now what? The situation in the car is tense, the smell becomes overwhelming and suffocating. Seemingly clueless, the girls stumble into some form of resolution. Thouraya uses her beauty and cunning, Ilham suffers from her consciousness and finds out that bodies in rigor mortis can not be taken out of a boot by a girl on her own. Three smart Dutch-Moroccan guys offer a way out. Thouraya makes the most of it. With a credit card the world looks up, and another corpse finds its way into some barren, sun baked field along the highway.

The language is contemporary, the atmosphere apt and at times erotic, the imagery auburn or sun-bleached, the tension is subcutaneous, the drive slow but relentless… Tommy, we want more! ( )

In this short, bleak snapshot of immigration and the refugee crisis, Wieringa follows two young Dutch women, both daughters of Moroccan immigrants, on holiday in Morocco. They run into a Dutch acquaintance, Saleh, and allow him to pressure them into helping him smuggle a young man, Murat, across the Strait of Gibraltar in the boot of their hire-car. Everything goes horribly wrong, Saleh disappears with their money, and the two women are left stranded in Spain with a dead man in the back of the car.

It's all very neatly and efficiently done, Wieringa pins down the problems faced by second-generation immigrants who feel Dutch when they are with Moroccans and Moroccan when they are with Dutch people, and he turns his point-of-view character Elhan into a very interesting and believable person — her hairdresser-friend Thouraya is maybe a little bit more of a cardboard cutout. In any case, it's their background that has got them into the situation, but once in it they are ordinary people faced with the sort of problem no-one is prepared for, and they react in exactly the sort of distressed and confused way any of us might.

I didn't really see the point of the little essay on the geo-history of the Mediterranean basin Wieringa sticks in as a prologue: it is a very nice piece of writing, but it doesn't really add anything to the story except a rather incongruously academic tone. He could just as well have put in an essay on the design history of Audi cars and the way the spare-tyre well is manufactured, for all the good it does. ( )

This novella is a relentless, compulsive, driven, and desperate story of two young women whose good intentions lead them to make ever more terrible choices. The way I experienced reading this novel reminded me of reading "Of Mice and Men"...it's a claustrophobic reading experience, where you know from the first few sentences the story is going to end badly, but you keep reading because the story and the situation feel true and important.

Wieringa brings alive the way his characters, second-generation women of dual Dutch and Moroccan citizenship, find themselves feeling culturally stateless, even though they both have two passports. They feel unwelcome in the Netherlands, the country where they were born. And yet when they travel to Morocco, the people immediately sense their foreignness and treat them as outsiders. The women are unprepared for the culture shock. They have naively believed that they would fit in. They're unable to take care of themselves. They are appalled by the economic disparity between the country they just left and the country they have traveled to. Their desire to belong leads them to make a disastrous series of decisions.

One reason I wanted to read The Death of Murat Idrissi was to see how a Dutch white male author approaches a story about two young Dutch women of Moroccan descent. He pulls it off masterfully. Wieringa's story is utterly sensitive to the experience of recent immigrants. A single, subtle paragraph is all Wieringa needs to establish how much harder these young women's lives became as Arab Muslim children growing up in the Netherlands after 9/11. Indeed, the women's dual citizenship, and their conflicting sense of self, play a key role, a true role I think, in making Wieringa's story so plausible and so affecting. ( )

Laat me beginnen met het positieve. Je leest dit boekje uit in iets meer dan een uur, en het houdt je echt wel in de ban. Zoals de titel en de flaptekst al onmiddellijk weggeven gaat het om een blijkbaar echt gebeurd dramatisch voorval bij de overtocht van een Marokkaanse migrant over de straat van Gibraltar. Wieringa brengt dit stilistisch knap aan, in een wervelende stijl met veel aandacht voor de sfeerschepping. En de manier waarop migrant, Murat Idrissi, omkomt is inderdaad ronduit tragisch.
Maar in tegenstelling met wat je zou verwachten mist het boek focus. De nadruk ligt maar ten dele op dit voorval en helemaal niet op de persoon en de achtergrond van Murat. In de plaats zoomt Wieringa eerder in op hoe de jongeren die betrokken zijn bij het drama, er mee omgaan. Protagoniste Ilham, een Nederlands-Marokkaans meisje met een nogal weifelend karakter is mooi getekend, zeker haar gewetensprobleem over hoe ze de zaak (het lijk in de kofferbak) moet aanpakken. Helaas zijn alle andere figuren van bordkarton en beantwoorden ze aan alle gangbare clichés: Ilham’s vriendin is een gewetenloze losbol, hun Marokkaanse vriend een charismatische dief, en alle jongens en mannen in Marokko voortdurend hitsig. Ook de manier waarop de plot wordt afgehandeld is amper geloofwaardig.
Het lijkt me dat Wieringa dit spannend maar oppervlakkig boekje tussen de bedrijven door heeft geschreven en zowel de compositie als de tekening van de figuren nauwelijks heeft doordacht. Dus ondanks de stilistische zwier slechts 2 sterren. ( )