Dutch literature doesn’t often break into the American market the way French, Italian or German literature does, but the first English translation of a major post-war Dutch novel, The Evenings by Gerard Reve, is attracting attention in the American press.
Published by the London-based Pushkin Press, The Evenings is being distributed in North America by Steerforth Press, of Hanover. The Evenings has already gone through three printings in this country, Steerforth publisher Chip Fleischer said in a phone interview.
Both Steerforth and Pushkin Press are publicizing the novel, while Steerforth handles the sales to online and brick-and-mortar bookstores.
In the UK, the coming-of-age novel, first published in the Netherlands in 1947, has seen six printings after reviews compared it, on the one hand, to such American classics as J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road; and on the other, to Albert Camus’ The Stranger.
“The Society of Dutch Literature named The Evenings Holland’s best novel of the 20th Century, and it continues to be taught in schools and read in a manner similar to The Catcher in the Rye here,” Fleischer wrote in a later email.
Steerforth and Pushkin are part of Hanover Publisher Services, a business launched by Steerforth in 2010 to offer smaller, independent publishers access to the distribution clout of Random House Publishers Services. (The three other companies under the Hanover Services umbrella are: Archipelago Books, of Brooklyn, N.Y.; New Europe Books, of Williamstown, Mass.; and Campfire Graphic Novels, of New Delhi, India.)
Although the early, positive reviews in the press for The Evenings are translating to sales, this doesn’t directly bring in money to Steerforth. However, it does “contribute to the success of the distribution business,” Fleischer wrote in an email.
And there’s almost nothing that a book reviewer likes better than discovering a lost or little-known novel that has been translated into English for the first time — as is the case with The Evenings — or is coming back into print.
A reviewer for the Irish Times called the novel a “masterwork of comic pathos,” while in a review in The Guardian last fall, Tim Parks called it a masterpiece that, with this first English translation, would finally get its due.
Parks also acknowledged that such a description is used so routinely that it’s hard to know when to believe the hype. But, he assured the reader, this book deserves both the praise, and a wider audience in the English-speaking world.
Set in the Amsterdam winter in the last weeks of 1946, The Evenings follows the grinding day to day of 23-year-old Frits van Egters who lives with his parents and has a mind-numbing job as a clerk. Frits is a sardonic soul, given to bilious observations about the people around him and the straitjacketed Protestant society in which he and his weary, middle-aged parents live.
Although no longer adolescent, he has the adolescent’s sense of disassociation from the adult world. His sense of isolation goes deep. What to do with himself after he leaves work? How to fill his evenings?
One aspect of Dutch life to which Frits doesn’t pay overt attention is the war from which Europe had just emerged. Nor does he allude to what was called the Hunger Winter, a famine in the German-occupied North during the winter of 1944-1945, that is estimated to have killed more than 20,000 Dutch.
Frits’s apparent indifference to the elephant in the room brought down upon the novel when it was first published the ire, or at least the bafflement, of Dutch critics, according to Parks’ review.
But, said Steerforth’s Fleischer, “if you’re paying attention when you read it’s suffused with both the war and the author’s sense of not being part of Dutch society.”
This was Reve’s first novel. Born in 1923, Reve, who was born Gerard Kornelis van het Reve, was just 23 when the book came out in the Netherlands. He was, it appears, something of an intellectual contrarian.
He was raised as a Protestant but converted to Catholicism; he was left-wing in some aspects but also staunchly anti-Communist; he never made a secret of being gay at a time when it was routinely hidden. In the 1960s he was prosecuted for blasphemy because he imagined, in his book Nearer to Thee, having sex with God, who came to him as a donkey; Reve was ultimately cleared.
It’s Reve’s humor that Fleischer said he appreciates. Reve writes bitterly observant interior monologues, which, in 1946, weren’t yet a staple of literary writing, and he records the details of post-war daily life — the dank cold of a house that never seems to warm, the food that comes out of tins, sucking on sugar cubes for treats.
There’s a sense of a country, and a continent, awakening from some horrible, lingering sickness and wondering how to begin the business of living again.
Apart from all the other literary comparisons, The Evenings reminds Fleischer of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Frits is a “very sensitive, artistic sensibility, detailing the life around him in a very careful way,” Fleischer said.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.