Inspiring Older Readers
The Evenings by Gerard Reve
This novel is generally thought to be a classic of post-war Dutch literature - a reputation that stretches well outside The Netherlands and encompasses much of continental Europe. However, for some unaccountable reason this 2016 translation by Sam Garrett and published by Pushkin Press is the first to appear in the UK.
Originally published in1947, The Evenings was controversial from the outset. Author Gerard Reve was born into a Communist family background but rejected that in favour of the Catholic church – but he was never a conformist or a someone who accepted the dominant discourse. He was openly gay and he also deliberately introduced extreme eroticism into his writing – as Dalya Alberge notes in her review in The Guardian :
In 1966, he was prosecuted for blasphemy, after he published writings in which the narrator has sex with God, incarnated as a donkey.
In The Evenings it is not eroticism that is the focus of Reve’s attention but rather a kind of post-war nihilism that many have compared to Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Jack Kerouac's On The Road or even the writing of Albert Camus. Reve seemed to be genuinely surprised by its reception and tried quite hard to disassociate himself from its growing cult status:
“I wrote The Evenings because I was convinced I had to write it. That seems to me a good enough reason. I hoped that 10 of my friends would accept a free copy and that 20 people would buy the book out of pity and 10 others by mistake. Things turned out differently. It’s not my fault it caused such an uproar.”
The story as such is a simple one. Twenty-three year old office drone, Frits, spends ten evenings over the Christmas and the New Year period visiting friends, killing time and getting irritated by his parents ( who he still lives with). His nights often involve him in dreaming lurid and surreal dreams of death or destruction that contrast violently with the mundane nature of his real life. His closest confident is a toy rabbit that he talks to.
What we really engage with however is Frits’ point-of-view running commentary. His relationship with his mother and father, his brother and family and his long-suffering friends is what really fascinates. He is the teller of usually wholly inappropriate ‘funny stories’, he seems to be obsessed with hair loss and constantly chivvies and childes his friends about this. When he’s left on his own he seems morbidly fascinated by his surroundings which take on a slightly sinister or alien demeanour. While all of this is going on we get constant snippets of his internal monologue which is commenting on his or other people’s actions.
This is very much a book about time and the passage of time. It’s impossible to read this book quickly because the pace of the writing and the detail of the passing hours requires you to plod along with it. The emptiness of suburban life is, literally on occasions, being ticked away by Frits as he watches his days slip away with nothing significant happening.
He is often irritated by his parents and their behaviour in a way most of us will recognise from our own youth but that doesn’t mean he’s incapable of genuine affection towards them – he just doesn’t show it, much in the same way as we neglect to show our affection to those we live with on a day to day basis.
Frits is undeniably real – but while we recognise that we’re also glad he’s not like us ( or at least so we suppose). It’s probably that shock of recognition that has led to so many people being simultaneously outraged by the book and at the same time making it into an enduring classic.
I have to be honest and say that for the first two thirds of the book I thought I was reading something that was genuinely remarkable and that this was, in the old cliché, a lost masterpiece – or perhaps more accurately a masterpiece that had been lost to UK readers until now. However, both my patience with Frits and with the overall sensibility of the novel began to flag noticeably after that point and by the end I was both a little bored and a little irritated.
I suspect this will be a book that will divide opinion – I can’t see it being a popular runaway hit with a general readership but I suspect that lovers of literary fiction will be intrigued by it and that they will find plenty in here that casts a light on the European post-war mind. I think I will need to read this again at some point in the not too distant future to make up my mind about it – but that’s not a bad thing.
Terry Potter
December 2016