Gerard Reve (1923–2006)

Op weg naar het einde often gets cited as Reve's breakthrough work, where he first found the combination of style and subject matter that suited him best. Like most of his later works, it's at an indeterminate point on the borderline between memoir and fiction - the narrator is the Dutch writer Gerard R from the city of A, but there's so much irony about that we can't be absolutely sure at any point that he's speaking for the author.

The book consists of six "travel diaries" (or letters) show more written in different places, but forming a kind of continuous narrative anchored on specific dates in 1962-63. The narrator attends a PEN conference in Edinburgh (Angus Wilson, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Muriel Spark and many other prominent writers of the time have walk-on parts); he returns to Amsterdam and has to cope with his partner Wim having run off with a plumber from Essex; he goes to London to attempt a reconciliation with Wim; he spends time with his friend P in the Essex countryside; he travels to Spain to try to reduce his living expenses. In between describing his adventures, there are many reflections on sex, religion, literature, death, and alcohol, often combined in unexpected ways (there's a magnificent passage where during Mass in an Amsterdam Catholic church, he has a sexual fantasy about a young man sitting opposite him). He fulminates entertainingly against the stupidity of his fellow-writers and the meanness of the reading public, who are not prepared to shell out a measly few guilders for a book.

The language itself is ironic: he writes about the most secular subject-matter in a style that recalls the religious writing of a few centuries earlier; he insists on quaint alternative spellings to add to the strangeness of what he's writing and force the reader to pay attention to the actual words (there seems to be some sort of etymological system to this, but obviously the main point is Verfremdung).

It's a funny, shocking and beautifully written book, and it comes with a good deal of period detail which sets my nostalgia engine working as well. There are some glorious moments in the text - when he stands up against Hugh MacDiarmid's homophobic comments at the PEN conference, for instance, or his diatribe in support of the Dutch writers' strike of 1962 when he goes on for page after page discussing the subsidy writers should get per page... show less

'De avonden' van Gerard Reve is misschien mijn favoriete Nederlandstalige boek tot nu toe. Reve maakt van de nietsheid van alledag 'iets': een verhaal dat kwelt, bedrukt en het leven in zijn afgrijselijke naaktheid toont. Waar Mulisch moet grijpen naar intellectualistische foefjes en een eindeloze stoet van feitjes, en waar Hermans een vervreemdende setting ('nooit meer slapen') nodig heeft, bereikt Reve genialiteit zonder de huiskamer te hoeven verlaten. Het werkelijk geniale aan 'de show more Avonden' zijn namelijk de avonden uit de titel zelf. De eindeloze avonden met de ouders, die zonder dromen leven en de banaliteit van het bestaan omarmen. Frits van Egters, een jongen met genoeg verstand om zich te realiseren dat zijn leven mislukt is, maar met te weinig verstand om er wat van te maken, is de tragische hoofdpersoon in dit verhaal. Hij kijkt, als een spion in een donkere kamer, naar het leven dat zich voor zijn ogen voltrekt. Er zit geen plot in dit boek, geen ontwikkeling, en juist daardoor heeft het die benauwende werking. Het toont de horror van saaiheid en de wanhopige poging van de mens het bestaan betekenis te geven.

Het verhaal van Reve staat uiteraard voor meer dan wat we lezen. Het is niet alleen het verhaal van een jongen die niets meemaakt: het is het verhaal van het leven dat nergens toe leidt. Reve gebruikt slechts schaars symboliek en het meest krachtige symbool wordt misschien wel weggelaten. Wat wil Frits in de laatste scéne zeggen? Was er toch nog niets van wezenlijk belang in zijn leven, dat wij niet te weten krijgen? Lees voor een waardevolle interpretatie verder op deze site: http://home.hccnet.nl/goed.gesprek/AlleenMensenZingen.htm. show less

Several friends advised me against reading this book: I think it has become one of those established classics that people take against because they were forced to read it at school. It's also rather a shock if you're expecting the linguistic, sexual and religious exuberance of late Reve: this is a far more sober, restrained affair. As I read it, the most striking comparisons that came into my mind were with the English "angry young men" of the fifties. Of course, it also ties in with all the show more obvious classics of frustrated youth (L'étranger, Steppenwolf, etc.), but there are a lot of elements - the descriptions of claustrophobic, purposeless, provincial lower middle-class life; the sense of wasting time; the fear and disgust associated with the process of ageing (and especially, of becoming like ones parents) and the undirected anger - that fit very nicely with what Osborne, Amis, Wain, Sillitoe and the rest would be doing ten years or so later.

In the context of post-war Dutch literature, of course it matters that Reve was talking about typically Dutch situations and sets his novel in a thinly-disguised version of Amsterdam. It also clearly matters enormously that the recent war and the German occupation are mentioned only fleetingly. Reve is making a statement about his own generation and their relation to Dutch history. With hindsight, we can also see that it's a novel by a gay author that only talks about sexuality very obliquely and indirectly. All of that is important, but I think what is most striking is the painful realism of the way Reve describes the banal interactions of everyday life. Frits's pointless and often unfinished conversations with his parents, the endless turning on and off of the radio, the family meals: those are the things that stick in my mind. show less

Collection of short lyrics from around 1970: mostly dealing with death or Catholic faith, but with a few little excursions into love and literature. Plenty of Reve's usual delight in paradox, irony and the unexpectedly shocking.