J. J. Voskuil (1926–2008)

The more things change, the more things remain the same: This is particularly true for Dutch author J.J.Voskuil’s monumental novel of office life, Het Bureau (“The Office”) of which this is the fifth. It brings us and our protagonist Maarten into the 80s, where things supposedly change: money is becoming scarce and financial cuts loom over all public institutions. There are even persistent rumours of the newly renamed A.P. Beerta Institute being shut down and you’d expect the show more Institute’s employees to roll up their sleeves and start working on preventing that.

Of course, you’d be completely wrong in that assumption (and you shouldn’t really be surprised about ít at this stage); instead of taking action, everyone just loafs around as they always did, calls in sick for the most ludicrous pretexts or simply refuses to do the work given to them. The only minor change is that the intrigues and the backstabbing become even fiercer now than they were before, as everyone is desperately scrambling for a piece of the increasingly smaller cake.

Und auch Wehmütigkeit (En ook weemoedigheid in the Dutch original, in English maybe something like “And also Wistfulness”) is by far the longest installment of Het Bureau so far (1200 pages in the German translation), but like its predecessors it is an easy, compelling read and the pages just fly by, even as nothing at all happens in them. Het Bureau, and this fifth volume in particular, is an excellent example why literature is something that needs to be experienced, and why even the best summary or the most insightful analysis will never do it justice. You can summarize all of the many thousand pages of Voskuil’s novel in one sentence, which would go something like “Office life is boring, nothing ever happens.” But to know what the novel really is like you will have to let this boredom unfold itself in and through the act of reading, will have to expose yourself to it and let it wash over you. Which is not all an unpleasant experience, like in the previous volumes Het Bureau’s boredom remains enigmatically entertaining, to the point where “Never has being bored been so much fun” might almost serve as the novel’s motto.

After four previous volumes (and one really should treat this as one long volume and start with the first installment), readers will be intimately familiar not just with Maarten Koning and his workplace but also with all of his colleagues and their quirks, not to mention his very outspoken wife, to the point where they’ll be able to predict quite precisely what is going to happen the moment any given scene starts because they have seen the same thing acted out many, many times before. With any other novel, one would suspect this to be incredibly tedious, but in Het Bureau it actually turns out to have a comical effect: every well-known eccentricity of a character, every repetition of a routine situation becomes a running gag, causing if not outright laughter then at least a knowing smile and possibly the occasional chuckle, and overall making this the funniest volume of the novel yet. By precisely the same virtue, however, it is also the saddest, because eventually there will dawn the realisation that for Maarten and his colleagues to be caught in this eternal recurrence of the always-identical is actually very depressing, its particular circle of hell. There is, however, a faint light at the end of the tunnel, for Maarten at least, as his retirement is only a couple of years ahead, something he is becoming increasingly conscious of. I am having a hunch that things may not be going as smoothly for him, but I will have to wait until the sixth and penultimate volume is released in German translation which is scheduled for May 2017. show less

The seventh and final part of Voskuil’s vast epic of office life — also by far the shortest — takes up the story on the first working day after Maarten’s retirement from the Institute. We follow him through the normal problems of adjusting to post-work life: recalibrating his life with Nicolien now that they are both at home all day, coping with the fact that he can no longer influence the way things go in his former department, and properly winding down his professional show more responsibilities outside the office.

Maarten and Nicolien go for numerous walks or bike rides in Amsterdam or elsewhere in the Netherlands, often described in great detail — something I particularly enjoyed because I know a lot of those places — and of course this gives Maarten the opportunity to reflect on how the world is changing in ways he isn’t comfortable with, something we all experience as we get older.

Despite the title, this doesn’t seem to be literally about the death of the character Maarten, but rather about the way retirement marks the death of the persona we create through our work. So it’s not quite as gloomy as you might expect.

Of course there’s a kind of euphoria about getting to the end of what seemed like an impenetrable wall of books when I first encountered it. Whether the effort required is commensurate with the result is hard to say — it is certainly one of the most intimate and merciless dissections of the curious social experience of office work I’ve come across, and the sheer length and near real-time quality of the book is part of the way it achieves that effect. But it remains one person’s experience. Voskuil doesn’t claim to be able to see working life through the eyes of anyone other than his autobiographical protagonist. Maarten is always Maarten, who is clearly 95% Voskuil, he never turns into a Dilbertish Everyman character, although a lot of his experiences turn out to be things that any long-term office worker can probably identify with, laugh at, or become frustrated about. But it’s also quite clear that many readers are going to find ploughing through several thousand pages of ethnographers arguing about office space and typewriter ribbons simply boring and futile. Particularly since the book is still only available in Dutch or German. Approach at your own risk! show less

When people talk about Het bureau, it's mostly to joke about its extraordinary length: a writer who has already taken 1200 pages to get his alter ego Maarten Koning through university (Bij nader inzien, 1963) is obviously not going to be able to compress his whole working life into the space of a novella, but still, 5000 pages split over seven parts is a bit extreme by most people's standards.

In this first part, we follow Maarten from 1957, when he is recruited to work in "The Office", a show more small research institute for Dutch language and culture in Amsterdam (based on the real Meertens Institute, where Voskuil worked himself), up to mid-1965, when Maarten's boss, Anton Beerta (based on P J Meertens) retires.

Voskuil's idea seems to be to be to examine the strange ways that office-work modifies normal human behaviour, with a gaze that's somewhere between that of the analytical ethnographer and the satirical novelist. The book gives as much prominence to questions of office furniture, budgets, typewriter ribbons and coffee breaks as it does to more conventionally important life-events, and often more: courtship and marriage, illness and death happen largely offstage, and we often see them only through the inevitable collections to be taken, flowers bought, and so on.

A big concern is how seriously it's possible to take the work that we do. Beerta clearly believes firmly in the value of the work the office does, but Maarten is sceptical — even though he does his best to justify his existence and produce scientifically-valid research, he finds it hard to believe that it really matters to anyone whether there are regional differences in farmers' customs for the disposal of mares' afterbirths (I assumed that this was simply a spoof, but apparently this is exactly what Voskuil's first published research was about!).

Although this is all back in the typewriter-and-index-card era, and the office I worked in had a radically different scale and purpose from Voskuil's, I was astonished how many of the day-to-day concerns of office politics Voskuil picks up on I recognised. The peculiar things that happen when you put a bunch of people with no other direct social connection together in a work environment and give them something to do that only has an indirect connection to the real world are obviously more general and universal than we might expect. And also often very much funnier.

I was hoping that I wouldn't like this book, but it's starting to look as though I'm going to have to read the remaining six parts after all... show less

With this fourth — and longest — part, we reach the mid-point of the series. We're in the years 1975-79, so Maarten Koning has now been at the Office for twenty years, and he's reached his fifties. The focus changes from the international scientific disputes which dominated Part Three, and we're now much more involved with Maarten's struggles to come to terms with his role as a manager and find ways to impose his authority on co-workers who have different ideas about how the job should show more be done — and indeed about what the job actually is, as there are still plenty of grey areas in the definition of ethnology as a subject.

The foreground is filled, as always, with the minute detail of coffee-breaks, filing-systems, staff-meetings and committees, but slightly offstage there's also the less distinct story of how Maarten's work is affecting his marriage. Maarten's mother-in-law is declining gradually into dementia, whilst Beerta is still mentally alert but has never quite recovered physically from the stroke he suffered at the end of Part Three, and is now living in a care-home. As the title has already given it away, it's no surprise to see this part ending with the Office being renamed in Beerta's honour. Other memorable set-pieces include a rather harrowing week of interviews of candidates for a vacant post, and a couple of departmental outings, on one of which Maarten has to be saved from sinking into a morass.

The scale and level of trivial detail of this novel is such that you sometimes get the depressing illusion that you're reading it in real time, and that Maarten will never catch up with you in age, but that's also its strength: it's easy to believe that no-one else has ever got close to the realism with which Voskuil captures the wave of despair that runs through you when you hear the words "I just have a small point concerning the minutes of the last meeting..." show less