The Evenings, by Gerard Reve

I had never heard of Gerard Reve, I picked this book at the Paagman bookshop in The Hague from the shelf of Dutch authors, because it looked interesting. And it really is, actually it's a masterpiece. A kind of existential novel, that kept reminding me of The Catcher in the Rye and La Nausée - the protagonist is more like Holden Caulfield than Roquentin, but the dread existential feelings evoked in me much the same feelings of when I read La Nausée, ages ago.

It is set in 1946 in Amsterdam, shortly after WWII, the war is hardly mentioned, but yet its shadow looms large over all the narrative, whether in the austerity of the living conditions of the characters or in the constant nightmares of the protagonist. The said protagonist is a 23 year-old man, likeable and relatable to all of us that have faced the meaninglessness of life when we lack a purpose. Frits is a keen if apparently detached observer, he tells somewhat tasteless jokes, plays mindgames with his friends, feels mad at his father's eating manners and his mother's clumsiness and vulgarity, and yet one feels he's not that aloof - in several scenes one sees that he actually loves his clueless parents and his somewhat condescending friends.

But basically he doesn't know what to do with his life, so the filling of time becomes a terrible chore, and that's mostly apparent in the evenings of the title, when he has to endure the time passing. He watches his parents, he visits his friends, he muses over his body. It feels painful, even if the writing is always slightly ironic and amusing, as when one eschews suffering by not taking oneself too seriously. The main question is - how to live life without a purpose? There is no inherent or objective meaning in life, we must find and build one to ourselves, and sometimes we just don't, and how much I relate to that.

I Burn Paris, by Bruno Jasiensky

This is an extraordinary book. I discovered it in a bookshop in Krakow, it looked interesting, so later I ordered it. It was a surprise, it's not that often that an old bookworm like me finds such an original and excellent work. I guess it could only have been written in the first quarter of the 20th century, when modernism turned the novel writing upside down.

The book is so original in so many ways. One can classify it as a dystopian book, or as a socialist book, but the good thing is that it defies classification - it deals with how society and civilized mores crash during a catastrophe, but also how humanity endures. His characters are all extremely humane and believable, ordinary human beings caught in extraordinary circumstances and questioning their moral standards. They're all real and endearing, and it's painful to watch their inexorable demise.

It's a wonderful read, and I highly recommend it.

Namesake - a shadow portrait

I have written small vignettes about my grandparents, and someone I never knew kept coming up on the narrative – I’m thinking about my greatgrandfather, my grandmother’s father. I remember hearing about him ever since I was a small child, and seeing his portrait hanging on the wall of my grandparents’ living room, and wondering about him. And as I get older, I keep thinking about this man, with whom I share not only an eighth of my DNA, but also my name, a strong-willed mother, a trade in health care, a wife dead at 34 years old, and a penchant for drinking.
He was a short blue eyed man, born in 1869 in a family of surgeon barbers, the youngest child. According to my grandmother (my main source to his life story), his mother was an extremely strong and intractable woman, whose character drove his older brothers away – one to Lisbon, another enlisted as a ship barber and died at sea.

So the youngest son inherited his father practice at 22, and stayed at home to take care of his mother. She had been over 40 when he was born, so probably he thought she wouldn’t live too long – life expectancy in a rural village in the 19th century was quite low. They say he decided to wait for his mother to die to marry, because she would never stand a daughter-in-law, and he apparently missed the opportunity to marry a girl from a nearby village whose grandson many years later married his granddaughter.
His mother lived until past 90, so he was over 40 when he finally married a beautiful woman 15 years younger than he was. I like to think they were happy together for the few years they had – they had three children, one of them died as a baby, and then he lost her to the flu epidemic in 1918. He was devastated by grief, and even more a few years later when his 5 year-old, who was being raised by his in-laws in a neighbouring village, died of some childhood illness. He was left with his only daughter, who he loved and doted on.
She always remembered her childhood as a most happy period, though. She left school early to take care of the household, her father trusted her and she soon learned how to run the house.

He was widely respected, loved and trusted – many years later, I still met several old people who remembered him fondly for his generosity and his healing skills. An intelligent and curious man, he studied health and medical books so he could perfect his practice as a surgeon, and he was considered better than most doctors by his fellow countrymen. They used to say they trusted him more when he was drunk than the doctor sober.
Drunk – that was the key word and the main issue. They say it was the grief due to his wife dying that drove him to drink – he would often whine about he had treated so many people but hadn’t been able to save his wife and his two sons. Whatever the reason, he took to drinking a lot, and that made him age fast, he became a depressed old man in his fifties, fearful for his daughter’s future, convinced that he would die soon.
So when this young man came along from Lisbon, to establish himself as the local pharmaceutic, a handsome and conservative man who loved the country life and seemed to follow all the right values, he was enchanted and relieved – here was the solution to his daughter’s future.
He lent him money to buy the local pharmacy, and gave him his 16 year-old daughter in marriage, thinking that he would secure her future that way. It was a bad decision. His son-in-law soon took charge of his wife and his father-in-law’s assets, and ran them according to his own will, strong and mostly misguided. So the old barber surgeon lived to see his daughter stuck in an unhappy marriage and oppressed by her husband, one can wonder how that made him sink even further more into drinking.

He was robbed while drunk, someone took his gold watch and chain, and he was tricked into selling his big house by a tenth of its value. Destitute, he had to go and live with his daughter and her husband. That was the ultimate ordeal, he would be daily humiliated by his son-in-law, who had established his business thanks to his money, and now ruled the household with an iron fist, even forbidding him to drink. My grandmother used to tell of how once, not allowed to drink his wine at lunch, he would throw his glass to the wall saying “if I can’t drink, then I don’t need a glass!”.

So he looked for solace in ore drinking; my uncle remembers fetching him from the taverns late at night. The drinking ruined his liver, and they say he once drank a whole bottle of pure alcohol, which was his end – he still lived for a few weeks, but then died the September 3rd 1944.
I grew up listening about him, and watching his portrait on the living room wall at my grandparents. I remember finding his barber’s razors in a hole in the cellar’s wall. Somehow, I always felt connected to this ancestor I never knew, as he never knew he would have this greatgrandson, born some 20 years after his death, from his favorite granddaughter, the one he used to say reminded him most of his beloved wife.