A.F.Th. van der Heijden

During the opening chapter of this second part of the "Tandeloze Tijd" sequence, we see perpetual student Albert holed up in his parents' home in Geldrop and at last preparing for his final exams. But it's a false dawn, unfortunately: A.F.Th. plays his Proustian joker and whisks Albert back to his earliest childhood memories, and it takes a good 450 pages to get him back to the point where we came in at the start of the previous volume. A small bonus is that we learn how some of the show more previously unexplained characters fit in, but I suspect most readers will by now be despairing of the Sisyphean task of attacking the remaining six parts of this autobiographical roman fleuve...

The "danger triangle" of the title defines the bounds of the Geldrop neighbourhood where Albert spent his early years, cut off from the rest of the world by a main road, a canal and a railway line. But it also refers to another kind of triangle that features in Albert's nightmares about his "sexual inadequacy", a problem he spends most of the second part of the book trying to rectify. It's difficult to say whether Albert's relationships with his various vulnerable girlfriends are more disturbing than the drunken violence and the hecatomb of domestic animals that between them dominate the first half of the book, though.

Strangely, despite the very unappealing characters and subject-matter, this is a book that does suck you in, and once I'd actually opened it I kept on reading with a kind of revolted fascination. Van der Heijden is a clever and vivid story-teller, and he knows what he's doing. Improbable as it all is, you feel as if you're getting a realistic picture of working-class life in the Eindhoven suburbs of the fifties and sixties. show less

A.F.Th. van der Heijden is one of the most important contemporary Dutch authors. His most impressive novel cyclus to date consists of the 5-volume cycle De tandeloze tijd. A second multi-volume cycle of novels is underway. Besides, Van Der Heijden (1951) has published a number of novels and short story collections. A number of his works are marked by the sub title as "a requiem". These publications were written to commemorate friends or family members. Between 1986 and 2012, Van Der Heijden show more published three such "requiems": De sandwich commemorates the death of a youth love and youth friend of the author. Asbestemming is presented as a requiem for his father, and Uitdorsten. Klein requiem voor mama, mam, ma for his mother. In his latest, grand novel and requiem, the author laments that he had never foreseen that one day he would have to write a requiem for his son. That requiem was published in 2011; Tonio. Een requiemroman, a requiem for his son, who died in a traffic accident in 2010.

Matrimonial happiness is often a spoiler of great art. A.F.Th. van der Heijden is essentially an autobiographical author, and between 1988, when his son was born, and 2010, when his son died, he devoted several short stories to describe his son and family. Some of these were included in Engelenplaque (2003) (Diaries) and Gentse lente (2008) (short stories). These short stories about domestic happiness are all very sentimental, and of little interest to readers of the authors main works. Although these fragments were used in the composition of Tonio. Een requiemroman, the author has found a way to reach a much higher level of literary achievement. The dramatic impact has spurned the author to the creation of great art.

In Tonio. Een requiemroman, Van Der Heijden has rediscovered the authorial voice that was so characteristic of De tandeloze tijd, and many readers missed in the much less well received new cycle of Homo Duplex. This sense is felt strong, as the setting of Tonio. Een requiemroman is the same as the most succesful novels in De tandeloze tijd cycle, notably De gevarendriehoek, and Advocaat van de Hanen, namely the city of Amsterdam.

Tonio. Een requiemroman describes the life of Tonio van der Heijden in meticulous detail, particularly the reconstruction of the last 24 hours of his life. It is a voluminous lament of the author and his wife for the loss of their son. The fact that this tome-like novel was published only a year after the death of Tonio is remarkable, especially because the author at first made the impression of being so devastated that he might never be able to publish again.

Despite its size, exceeding 630 pages, Tonio. Een requiemroman never bores. It is extremely well-written, as the narrative swings between a very personal tragedy and universal significance. As the novel demonstrates, and the facts about the final hours of his life show, Tonio's death was a pure tragedy, in which "blind fate' destroyed the life of a young person, full of promise and ambition, leaving no one to blame. Naturally, the parents blame themselves, though even they learn that this should not be.

Despite the grave and serious theme of death, Tonio. Een requiemroman offers a sufficient dose of hilarity to make for attractive reading. In this sense of humor, the author reaches the best heights of his previous succesful work, a level absent from many of his works for quite a while. Readers will love the role played in the novel by the city of Amsterdam. show less

Mini-Ulysses set in Amsterdam against the background of the riots on the day of Queen Beatrix's inauguration, 30 April 1980. A lot of play with symbols (especially scissors) and a lot of semi-ironic references to Great Literature: van der Heijden seems to be teasing the literary establishment by arguing that, assuming the Netherlands deserves a great national epic, then the protagonists should be heroin-addicted petty criminals and right-wing taxi drivers, and the great battles should be show more fought between squatters and riot police. Of course, this is the early eighties, when all literary novels had to be about drug addicts, irrespective of which country they were set in. Conceived as a prologue to vdH's cycle De tandeloze tijd, but works pretty well as a self-contained novel too. show less

This novel forms the first part of van der Heijden's long and still ongoing series of (semi-)autobiographical novels De tandeloze tijd ("Toothless time"). It opens in spring, 1976, with the author's fictional alter ego Albert Egberts approaching his 26th birthday and near the end of his time as a student in Nijmegen, and moves on to take him back to his parents' house in Geldrop (outside Eindhoven) to retrace the key events of his childhood that have defined his relationship with his parents show more and his closest friends, and in the process dig into the mystery of how we deal with the cruelty of fate's having thrown us into this nasty, irreversible sequence of birth and death. Through consuming alcohol, mainly, it seems...

The structure of the book is frustrating to deal with, because van der Heijden likes to tell us things "in the wrong order", so that we get many unintelligible teaser-references to a character or a situation before we are actually told about it. Albert's parents, who are obviously the most important characters in the book (and not only on the strength of the title — the various accidents that happen to them give the book its key image structure) don't appear until after 150 pages or so: up to that point he might as well be an orphan, and we have to sit through egregious amounts of student drunkenness before we get to the real social and narrative content. Of course, the drunkenness isn't just there for show, it tells us important things about who Albert is and what life was like in 1976, and van der Heijden is a good raconteur, but I'm sure we could have got there in half the time with someone else...

It wasn't necessarily meant as a period novel — it came out only a few years after the foreground story — but I found that aspect of it almost the most interesting, the very particular cultural environment of that generation born in the first few years after the war, moving from working-class poverty to the new world of perpetual students and subsidised artists (that wonderfully Dutch institution, the BKR...). Of course here it also has that quite specific stamp of the Dutch provinces "below the great rivers," and of Eindhoven in the days when the whole of life there still revolved around Philips and the Catholic Church (in that order). show less