Gerard Reve's The Evenings was first published in the author's native Netherlands in 1947. Now, almost 70 years later, it appears in English, although not as a lost-and-found masterpiece but a woefully late arrival.
Reve's debut novel caused an uproar on its immediate release but went on to be critically-acclaimed and hugely popular. Today, Reve is hailed as one of the greatest post-war Dutch writers. The Evenings has never been out of print and was ranked by The Society of Dutch Literature as the country's best novel of all time.
All the more remarkable, then, that this perennial favourite has never been available to Anglophone readers. Sam Garrett’s expert translation allows us to see what we have been missing. This is an edgy, atmospheric and sardonically funny book which was way ahead of its time. Still possessing the power to shock but also to beguile, the novel’s bold stylistic tricks and its hero’s original thoughts and deeds mark it out as a classic in any language.
The book unfolds over 10 consecutive evenings at the end of December 1946. Frits van Egters is a 23-year-old daydreamer, idler and procrastinator who is besieged by boredom and ashamed of his middle-class family. His office job is dull (“I take cards out of a file. Once I have taken them out, I put them back in again. That’s it.”) and his home-life consists of moping around, listening to the radio or squabbling with his parents. Time out involves listless, directionless walks along Amsterdam’s streets and canals or venting his spleen to a toy rabbit.
Despite regularly frittering away hours doing next to nothing, Frits never actually squanders a whole day. A morning and afternoon can be lost, even ruined, “But the evening can still make up for a great deal.”
Come twilight he becomes animated. Whole chapters are devoted to each evening’s entertainment: outings to cinemas, theatres and dancehalls, visits to his brother Joop and his friend Jaap. Frits opens up, sloughs off his humdrum daytime self and becomes the centre of attention or life and soul of a party.
This may sound compelling enough to constitute a diverting romp, but not a country’s touchstone text. However, Reve’s magic touch is his protagonist’s unique mindset and captivating mood swings. After dark, Frits lets loose bawdy jokes and grisly tales. He indulges in existential debates, reveals illicit desires, and rants about his greatest fears, including that “gruesome infliction”, baldness. Every day culminates in sleep that is sullied by a surreal and disturbing dream.
The Evenings was published five years after Albert Camus's The Stranger, and whether by accident or design the former has much in common with the latter. Both revolve around the empty pursuits of alienated and disaffected young men; both are studies of ennui tinged with cruelty. "I have a sick soul," Frits declares to his rabbit, by which point he has discussed killing with his sadistic friend Maurits, recounted anecdotes about torturing insects, and admitted that old people are a "plague" and a "burden".
Fortunately, he may be spared the job of bumping off his own parents: “I’m only waiting for them to hang themselves or beat each other to death.”
Frits’s nihilistic outlook combined with Reve’s experimental novelistic flourishes make the novel feel considerably more modern. Plot is dispensed with entirely. Dialogue comes bunched together in the same paragraph, sometimes to disorientating effect.
As with Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle cycle of novels, Reve clogs sentences with the unfiltered minutiae of daily life. Everything is recorded: quotidian detail, inane exchanges, inconsequential impulses and gestures.
None of it should work: neither Frits counting down the hours at home, watching his mother knitting, “Needles ticking like a fast clock”, nor Frits unleashed at another soirée and sharing his seemingly unedited, untelescoped nocturnal movements.
Or, on a more banal level, Frits with his family rhapsodising over his mother’s gravy, or Frits with his friends differentiating between a draught and wind. And yet by day and by night Frits remains curiously vital, his wayward antics and rambling thoughts possessing a strange allure, hypnotically energising not soporifically draining.
“Every man has his story,” Frits says, “but it is seldom an important one.” Reve went on to tell more stories until his death in 2006, but it was this one which proved to be far and away the most important.
After entrancing generations of Dutch readers, it is now time for a wider audience to discover its weird textures and dark delights.
Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer based in Edinburgh.