Edited and with an Introduction by
Joost Zwagerman
* * *
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF DUTCH SHORT STORIES
Contents
Introduction
Chronology
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF DUTCH SHORT STORIES
1 MARCELLUS EMANTS
An Eccentric (Een zonderling)
2 LOUIS COUPERUS
The Opera Glasses (De binocle)
3 ARTHUR VAN SCHENDEL
The Green Dream (De groene droom)
4 NESCIO
Young Titans (Titaantjes)
5 F. BORDEWIJK
The Briefcase (De aktetas)
6 MARIA DERMOÛT
The Sirens (De sirenen)
7 SIMON VESTDIJK
My Brown Friend (De bruine vriend)
8 BELCAMPO
Funeral Rights (Uitvaart)
9 A. ALBERTS
Green (Groen)
10 ANTON KOOLHAAS
Mr Tip is the Fattest Pig (Mijnheer Tip is de dikste meneer)
11 HELLA HAASSE
The Portrait (Het portret)
12 W. F. HERMANS
Glass (Glas)
13 F. B. HOTZ
Women Win (Vrouwen winnen)
14 HARRY MULISCH
What Happened to Sergeant Massuro? (Wat gebeurde er met Sergeant Massuro?)
15 JAN WOLKERS
Feathered Friends (Gevederde vrienden)
16 CEES NOOTEBOOM
Paula
17 REMCO CAMPERT
The Kid with the Knife (De jongen met het mes)
18 J. M. A. BIESHEUVEL
The Shattering Truth (De verpletterende werkelijkheid)
19 BOB DEN UYL
War is Fun (Oorlog is leuk)
20 MAARTEN ’T HART
Castle Muider (Het Muiderslot)
21 HELGA RUEBSAMEN
Olive (Olijfje)
22 MENSJE VAN KEULEN
Sand (De spiegel)
23 NICOLAAS MATSIER
The Minnema Variations (De Minnema-variaties)
24 FRANS KELLENDONK
Foreign Service (Buitenlandse dienst)
25 OEK DE JONG
The Motionless Man (De onbeweeglijke)
26 THOMAS ROSENBOOM
Tincture (Tinctuur)
27 A. F. TH. VAN DER HEIJDEN
The Byzantine Cross (Het Byzantijnse kruis)
28 MARGRIET DE MOOR
Sunrise Day (De dag van Zonnegloren)
29 P. F. THOMÉSE
The Southern Continent (Zuidland)
30 MARCEL MÖRING
East Bergholt
31 MANON UPHOFF
Poop (Poep)
32 JOOST ZWAGERMAN
Winnie and the Innocence of the World (Winnie en de onschuld)
33 HAFID BOUAZZA
Ghost Town (Spookstad)
34 ARNON GRUNBERG
Someone Else (Iemand anders)
35 SANNEKE VAN HASSEL
Indian Time
36 JOOST DE VRIES
A Room of My Own (Een kamer voor mezelf)
Author Biographies
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF DUTCH SHORT STORIES
Joost Zwagerman (1963–2015) was a novelist, poet, essayist and editor of several anthologies. He started his career as a writer with bestselling novels describing the atmosphere of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Gimmick! (1988) and False Light (1991). In later years, he concentrated on writing essays – notably on pop culture and visual arts – and poetry. Suicide was the theme of the novel Six Stars (2002). He took his own life just after publishing a new collection of essays on art, The Museum of Light.
Introduction
One day in 2007, the American translator Damion Searls had a meeting in Brussels with the Dutch novelist Tommy Wieringa, several of whose novels – such as Joe Speedboat and These Are the Names – have now appeared in translation in many countries. Searls asked Wieringa who he believed was the greatest Dutch writer of the past one hundred and fifty years. Wieringa’s answer was Nescio (1882–1961), the author of a small but highly cherished body of short stories, including the two crystalline miniatures ‘Young Titans’ and ‘Little Poet’. Nescio’s stories outshine many a fat Dutch novel, in Wieringa’s opinion and that of numerous Dutch writers. Searls read Nescio’s stories in German translation and was blown away by his seemingly plain yet unapologetically lyrical style. It was hard for him to reconcile this lyricism with the popular image of the Dutch as level-headed, hard-working people.
Searls went to the editors of the New York Review of Books Classics series to advocate an English edition of ‘Young Titans’ and Nescio’s other stories. The editor Edwin Frank was equally thunderstruck by Nescio’s sprightly, melodious mode of storytelling, and Amsterdam Stories appeared in 2012 – almost eighty years after Nescio’s book had been published in the Netherlands. Nescio, the pseudonym of J. H. F. Grönloh (an office clerk by day), had at last won a place in the ranks of the world’s great short-story writers. One might well ask whether that was what Grönloh wanted; at first, he did not tell the public that he was Nescio the writer, because ‘if people find out that you write, they think you must not be qualified for your “real” work’.
Nescio’s American editor has spelled out the strengths of the story ‘Young Titans’: ‘It’s about the melancholy of young men, but subtly laced with the melancholy of an older man looking back on the particular, bygone melancholy of his youth. While the young friends in the story experience that period of their lives as constrained, the narrator, grown older, realizes what immense opportunities they had back then. Each of the young friends failed, in his own way, to seize those opportunities. The hell of constraint, as experienced in one’s youth, is transformed – with an appropriate degree of unrealistic idealization – into the heaven of seemingly boundless possibilities. It’s a turn of thought and emotion with which everyone can identify. And then there are the wonderful descriptions of the Dutch landscape. It’s a remarkably beautiful, lyrical work. But “Young Titans” also has an intriguing social component, besides which it touches on what may be the ultimate Dutch dilemma: the impossibility of reconciling, either in fact or in imagination, the prosaic spirit of commerce with poetic dreams of a life that transcends the mores of trade and business. All these facets are interlinked in one short story, which, furthermore, is written in a suggestive style, laconic and evocative in equal measure.’
Often, as in this case, it takes an outsider to explain to us here in the Netherlands why a particular work of art deserves its place in our national canon. We love the young men with dreams that are bound to perish, such as Bavink the painter, who is so determined to ‘paint the sun’. Yet it took an American reader to point out one of the story’s most attractive features: the fateful tension between a life spent in trade or business and a life lived for art. Dutch readers feel this tension but don’t always realize that it not only underpins the story but also resonates in the author’s style.
And as far as trade and business are concerned, I know full well that the Netherlands has a reputation, to this day, as a small but industrious nation shored up by the unrelenting activity of merchants and businessmen like Grönloh. Fortunately, Nescio offered a glimpse of the other side of the Netherlands: a country that, generation after generation, has given birth to scores of headstrong ‘Young Titans’, energetic innovators in art, music and literature, many of whom swing between moods of hushed serenity and outbursts of unadulterated Wel
tschmerz or experimental ruckus. Not what you might expect from this supposedly hard-headed country. The prototypical Dutch writer creates protagonists that are – excuse the contradiction in terms – contemplative arch-romantics, reserved iconoclasts. Keep this prototype in mind, and you will understand the personalities of more than a few of the authors in this collection.
Other writers in the NYRB Classics series are also included here: Maria Dermoût and Marcellus Emants, with whose story ‘An Eccentric’ the collection opens. Emants (1848–1923), who belonged to the circle of Dutch naturalist authors, felt a strong kinship with Émile Zola and Ivan Turgenev and kept up a correspondence with Turgenev for years. Yet for Dutch readers, Emants is an admired but distant figure, as are A. Aletrino, Frans Coenen and other naturalists of the same generation, even though they were active less than one hundred and fifty years ago. Readers in France, Germany, Russia, England and the United States can still easily read ‘their’ authors from the not-so-distant past. Present-day French readers can appreciate Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables without a dictionary, and for a child in Manchester required to read Macbeth, Shakespeare’s writing is not nearly as impenetrable as a book written in Hebrew or Hindi.
In contrast, the Dutch language is constantly in the throes of change so radical and sweeping that Dutch linguistics and literature departments at universities in the Netherlands offer courses in ‘diachronic linguistics’, in which these changes are the topic of investigation. Many great works of seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dutch literature have to be translated into modern Dutch to make them accessible to the average reader, to whom eighteenth-century Dutch – and I do not exaggerate – seems almost like a foreign tongue, as exotic and indecipherable as Hindi.
Consequently, even cultured Dutch readers generally pay mere lip service to their country’s literary canon. In secondary school, we are introduced – however briefly – to the leading literary lights of our Golden Age, Joost van den Vondel and P. C. Hooft, but only a small number of academics are still equipped to read Vondel’s play Lucifer in its original form. By now, it has been through at least four rounds of translation and modernization.
Even nineteenth-century Dutch authors are now drifting away into the abstract, inaccessible backwaters of the canon, at the same time that Dutch readers have a wide choice of recently translated nineteenth-century stories and novels by great writers in major world languages, such as de Maupassant, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert and Henry James. A new Dutch translation of Joyce’s Ulysses, published in 2014, received more publicity and attracted more readers than a new edition of a Dutch masterpiece, Multatuli’s Max Havelaar (1860), about an eccentric loner’s battle against the corrupt colonial regime in the Dutch East Indies.
The growing impenetrability of our own canon, combined with a long-established interest in classic literature in major world languages, has unmistakably influenced our image of our own literary culture. In fact, many Dutch readers have almost completely lost touch with our own classics. Fortunately, however, there is still a widespread awareness that our literary tradition measures up to those of the most influential and widely spoken world languages. The world knows about our windmills, our footballers and our drugs policies (no longer as libertarian as they once were), and the Dutch literati are especially proud of our world-famous artists, such as Vermeer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Mondrian and Marlene Dumas. Their importance is universally recognized, and the canon of Dutch art is integral to Western art history. Our literature likewise merits recognition as an integral part of world literary history.
Only about twenty-five years ago, when the Netherlands and Flanders were the Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair, did a relatively large number of Dutch-language novels begin to be published in translation elsewhere in Europe. Since then, many books have been translated by major authors such as Cees Nooteboom, Margriet de Moor, Harry Mulisch, W. F. Hermans, Arnon Grunberg, Leon de Winter and Connie Palmen, most of whom have a short story in this collection.
Leading German newspaper Die Welt comments, ‘How is it possible that, until now, we never discovered the élan and esprit of literature from the country next door? In comparison with the average German author, Dutch writers are bundles of energy, life and healthy curiosity about the world around them. We have to make do with writers who fill page after page with their own little lives and problems, spelled out in excruciating detail, while they write with such freshness and agility that they seem to be in the thick of life. In Dutch novels, we find characters who give every impression of being real people, down to the innermost layers of their personalities, rather than mouthpieces for grandiloquent effusions. These true-to-life characters inhabit a dynamic society, and in many novels that society is unmistakably part of a larger world, a world of turbulence and unfathomable diversity that infiltrates the literary sphere. Dutch writers place their characters in settings that do justice to the social, political and personal dynamics which keep our lives in constant transformation. Here in Germany, literature seems to have gone rigid; Dutch literature, on the other hand, is in flux and ferment. Personal fascinations and obsessions blend seamlessly into sketches of times and places, leaving room for ambiguity and, in the words of one of the greatest Dutch writers since the Second World War, magnifying the riddle of our lives, partly thanks to the irresistible stylistic ingenuity and tremendous eagerness with which Dutch writers dare to tell stories and conjure up images.’
In the United States, John Updike called The Assault by Harry Mulisch (1927–2010) ‘a perfect novel’. The book describes a German raid during the Second World War in the city of Haarlem, North Holland, and its impact on the neighbourhood over a period of decades. Updike’s review opens with the words: ‘The chance of birth gives a writer his language; if the language is a small one, like Dutch … the writer must be more than merely good to receive international attention.’ Updike continued to follow Mulisch’s career after this first review, and he commented on the novel Last Call: ‘Mulisch is a rarity for these times – an instinctive psychological novelist … He builds his plots with a dense architecture.’ When authors such as J. M. Coetzee and Milan Kundera followed in Updike’s footsteps, publishing essays on Dutch novels in translation, it forever changed the one-sided conversation that Dutch writers had always held with the rest of the world. Finally, the world was talking back. This was the start of a modest literary dialogue, and the Netherlands earned a place on the map as a literary hot spot.
An even more crucial step in the dissemination of Dutch literature in a growing number of languages was the enthusiasm of the illustrious Polish-German critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki for the novel The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom (b. 1933), part of the same generation as Mulisch: ‘This book made a deep impression on me, and I deeply regret having overlooked, and not read, all of Nooteboom’s books until now. He is a very important European author, and this is one of the most important books, perhaps the most important book, that I have read in years … The book touched me deeply … I recommend it because it is true literature … I like to talk about false bottoms, the hallmark of literature, and here we find a false bottom, here are literature and poetry. I am deeply impressed with this Nooteboom; look, the Dutch, too, have an author like this!’ These words of praise were followed by many translations of The Following Story.
The international praise for Mulisch and Nooteboom opened the way for translations of novels by younger writers from Marcel Möring to Connie Palmen, and from the above-mentioned Tommy Wieringa to Arnon Grunberg. But while increasing numbers of Dutch novels are available to readers in major world languages, our eloquence in another literary genre, the short story, remains more or less undiscovered. Some critics in the Netherlands believe that three great Dutch writers of the past century – F. Bordewijk, Willem Frederik Hermans and Harry Mulisch – are at the peak of their ability in their short stories, showing their most radical sides. Their radicalism finds expression in their stylistic experiments and fanciful f
orms, the joyous anarchy of their narrative voices, their blend of taut description and slippery surrealism, and their mastery of that vital technique of the short story: namely, omission.
Some of our greatest short-story writers seem to have felt the need to apologize for working in this genre. Remco Campert (b. 1929), another Dutch master of the short story (and a well-loved poet), once said in an interview: ‘I’m not sure the novel is really in my system. My only ambition has been to write good stories, in the tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald or Truman Capote.’ As if it were a trivial matter to craft a tale in the tradition of those two authors. Campert is not only one of our greatest but also one of our most modest writers, and would never make sweeping claims about himself. So others, like me, have to make them on his behalf: Campert’s body of work can hold its own against either Scott Fitzgerald or Capote. Campert’s stories now cover a period of five decades, and some of them convey a subtle sense of historical period: while Fitzgerald is the icon of America’s Roaring Twenties, Campert is the great chronicler of the oppressive Dutch climate of the 1950s and the country’s sexual and social ‘liberation’ in the 1960s and ’70s, and his stories track the sometimes rocky development of Dutch sexual and social mores. Yet at the same time his style is a miracle of clarity, nothing short of timeless. Campert’s evocations of time and place always cover up the same underlying dynamics of slight psychological shifts and subtle social relationships. Campert is the master of finely honed observation, of dialogue whose natural sound conceals its ingenious refinement. Of all the writers mentioned here, Campert may be Nescio’s most gifted heir. In any case, his idiom is deceptive in its simplicity; it will be a long time before the language of his stories needs updating. ‘The Kid with the Knife’, included in this anthology, shows that Campert, like Fitzgerald and Capote, is capable of evoking an atmosphere and historical setting that can keep the entire story aloft. ‘The Kid with the Knife’ also contains one of the finest opening sentences in the history of the Dutch short story: ‘You only had to snap your fingers and it was party-time.’ That sentence is followed by a quick, atmospheric sketch that brings to life that age of unbridled festivity. In a single compact and lyrical image, Campert underlines its sublime nonchalance: ‘At 3 a.m. anything was possible: you could do a handstand on a genever bottle.’ But in the same opening sentences, he also recalls the dark side of that epoch of euphoria and intoxication: ‘Your thoughts had disintegrated into isolated words – key words, which you kept on mumbling, because you were afraid you would cease to exist if you forgot these words as well.’ Light-hearted whimsy and a subtle portrait of fear in two brief opening paragraphs – and then Campert spins his story of the boy who brought a knife to a party, twisting together strands of comedy and tragedy, conveying both the whimsy and the fear, and never letting on to his readers whether he’s drawing them into a sunny or a sinister tale.
The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories (Penguin Modern Classics) Page 1