Verwoest Arcadië

Verwoest Arcadië ("Destroyed Arcadia") is an autobiographical novel in which Komrij takes a charming, funny, and perceptive look back at his childhood in the small town of Winterswijk and his student days in Amsterdam. Much as he does in his poems, he uses jokes and paradoxes to lead himself and the reader up to some quite difficult and painful truths about growing up, self-awareness and the consciousness of mortality. But he mostly talks about his lust for books and beautiful boys (like most of us, he seems to have found it easier to feed the first than the second of these, they take up space in the ratio of about ten to one in the text). He talks a bit about the problems of hindsight in autobiography, and he warns us not to take his show more fictional alter ego, Jacob, as historically reliable, which then gives him the excuse to make critical judgements about the books Jacob was reading which are clearly not Jacob's views but those of the mature narrator, but which are very funny and perceptive anyway. The sort of book that makes you wish you could have had a chance to meet the author in real life. show less