Maatstaf. Jaargang 34

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Boek van de maand

Anita Brookner, Providence

I found this book in the newspaper kiosk of the Central Station in The Hague and read it on the train. The effect was like riding up to Groningen and back while sitting under a damp blanket. Its mournful, nagging tone made me feel that the author, while writing it, was struggling with a depression she couldn't shake off. It's like one long drawn-out sigh, or rather a series of many sighs because the style is very careful and detailed, like lace-work. The book is about a young woman, a lecturer in French literature, who is laboring under the delusion that her fellow-lecturer and secret lover will openly claim her. She's a daughter of French immigrants in London, who doesn't really fit into the British class-structure. Her lover, a member of the upperclasses, keeps her at arm's length and finally opts for a girl from his own class. The message of the book: ‘How could I have been so blind’, or, ‘Great expectations dashed’. This is the theme that Barbara Pym handled in Excellent Women, but this book lacks Pym's humor and common-sense, - her backbone, in a word. Brookner's thin plot might have done better in a short story (one thinks of Katherine Mansfield) - but of course novels are the thing to write nowadays. Best in the book are the passages of analysis of B. Constant's Adolphe, that the heroine is supposedly studying with her students. One wishes one could cut them out and save them.

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E.M. Cioran, De l'inconvenient d'être né

I found this book, a paperback in the Gallimard series Idées, in the Ulysses bookshop in The Hague. I had heard the name Cioran before but thought it was some kind of anagram. At last a philosopher worth reading - and so very readable. He uses the epigram-form: it avoids blather and obfuscation, encourages distillation and concision. Cioran's black pessimism about the human race, his disgust at its manifestations, his ideal of doing nothing as the highest good, his yearning for Nothingness, to which he longs to return after having undergone the curse of having been born - all these operate together to make one feel cheerful, even exhilarated, the way one feels after walking around for several hours in a cemetery. I have ordered his other books in order to continue the pleasant habit of reading a few pages every night just before falling asleep. The effect is oddly comforting: one closes one's eyes very content at the idea that one might not wake up again, and relieved at the prospect that someday there will come an end to it.

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Ernst Jünger, Op de marmerklippen. Vertaald en van een nawoord voorzien door Tinke Davids.

This book was given to me by the Arbeiderspers. Like Coleridge's poem about Xanadu, it was conceived in a dream, and written in a trance. But where the poem of Coleridge was obsessed by the secret fascinations of the 19th century, sexual pleasure and sensual voluptuousness, Jünger's work is obsessed by the taboos of the 20th century, violence and gory horror. If any proof was needed that dreams can be prophetic, then this book provides it; if the first publication hadn't been in 1939, I would have thought it was a hoax written after the event, so weirdly does it forespell what was to happen in Europe in the ensuing years. Op de marmerklippen is an allegory: I thought the form was dead, but Jünger here blows new life into it. Its high-strung, exalted, throbbing style has been brilliantly rendered in Dutch by the translator Tinke Davids, so lusciously that you

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read each sentence twice, rolling it around on your tongue. There is something very Anglo-Saxon about it, like the epic poetry of the scop who at the end of a meal at the lord's table would strike his harp and sing; also very Anglo-Saxon is the way a paragraph often ends with a summary sentence of gnomic wisdom... The dreams that Jünger records in his Journals are very much like the atmosphere in this book; one thinks, if there is such a thing as the German soul, then this is what it must look like. The same kind of atmosphere can be found in Le roi des aulnes by Tournier; he must certainly have been influenced by this extraordinary book. Yet in its way it is also a period-piece, very high-thirties in its characters and situations. Oddly enough it sometimes reminded me of Max Reinhardt's film Siegfried, also from the same era.

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