Backlisted - The Evenings by Gerard Reve

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

Joining John and Andy this week are novelist Marie Phillips (Gods Behaving Badly, Oh, I Do Like To Be...) and novelist, screenwriter and poet Joe Dunthorne (Submarine, O Positive). The book we are discussing is Gerard Reve's debut novel De Avonden AKA The Evenings, which caused a sensation when published in the Netherlands in 1947 and is now considered a classic. In the words of Herman Koch, it may be 'the funniest, most exhilarating novel about boredom ever written'. Reve was only 24; he went on to have a long, successful and frequently scandalous career but only a handful of his books have been translated into English. Also in this episode John digs Bella Bathurst's new book Field Work: What Land Does to People & What People Do to Land and Andy surveys Landscapes of Detectorists and discovers prose to treasure.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)10:26 - Landscapes of Detectorists by Innes M. Keighren & Joanna Northcup16:29 - Field Work: What Land Does to People & What People Do to Land by Bella Bathurst22:07 - The Evenings by Gerard Reve* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights.

There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness and July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. so this is the little bit of informal chat at the beginning and Nikki can almost, she can fade herself up telling us this story.

How did this come about, Nikki Birch? What is the particular strange alignment of stars and circumstances that brought this episode about? I'm slightly embarrassed to say. Go on. Do it. Well, you know how some people go to book clubs? Yeah.

Well, I've heard. As soon as, and this is the truth, as soon as we could, right, Joe, as soon as the law enabled us to gather, the law enabled us to gather. The first thing that Joe and I did was go to a podcast club. A podcast club? What's that? It's a bit like book club. Where you sit around listening to a podcast?

No, you listen to the podcast in advance and then you talk about them. Ah, oh my God. Oh God, says Andy. That sounds awful. That sounds terrible. It's actually really good. We went to our podcast club, which was in the, it wasn't even a garden. It's a roof garden of a mutual friend's house.

And it was literally the first event. And don't know about you joe but i was very had been working all day i was probably working probably producing and backlisted anyway and i had like worked up until the point of leaving and i turned up at this um podcast club completely empty-handed but only with one thing, my swimming costume. Because I've been told that the host had a hot tub. Yeah, which she'd bought as a lockdown treat to herself, as I understand. And it was tiny, wasn't it? It was. That was a bit. So I climbed this hot tub and uh all of a sudden joe and

i are sitting next to each other knees knocking drinking uh drinking wine in a hot tub it was pretty awesome it was pretty awesome so we started talking and after about what half an hour he told me he wrote books and then we realized that all networking should be done in a hot tub and then we realised that all networking should be done in a hot tub. Yes, Andy. And lo, a backlisted episode was born out of the hot tub. This is actually how all backlisted episodes come together. I have never knowingly been in a hot tub,

but I was on Twitter a few weeks ago, and i saw that the author marie phillips was tweeting about a book and this is what she wrote she said if you want a hilarious book that absolutely captures the terrible monotony of lockdown living i highly recommend the evenings by gerard reeve or we well we'll come on to how you say in in a minute. Yes, it came out in 1947, but the energy is utter 2020-21. And I replied to you and said, oh, that sounds good. And you said, Marie, and you said, I think it will be right up your street. And I said, I very much enjoy reading about tedium. So, yes.

And you thought I was joking, but it's not. I do really enjoy it i love i love novels about i don't like boring novels but i do like novels about boredom i find them very um stimulating and often quite funny it did not even cross my mind that you were joking when you said you enjoyed reading about tedium i was like of course of course he does. But then, and then when Joe said he was going to, you know, he got out of the hot tub and said, have I got a book I'd like to talk about on Batlisted? I've got a book for you. And he mentioned the same, the same book. I just thought, oh, we've got to do that.

It's so brilliant to be able to bring these different strands together so thank you both very much yeah and here we are in a kind of oral hot tub we haven't even a world hot tub even more germs perfect pandemic we haven't even started yet this is just the warm-up Perfect pandemic. We haven't even started yet. This is just a warm-up. Shall we crack on? Let's crack on.

Okay. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today, you find us in the Netherlands, the port of Amsterdam, to be precise. It is December 1946. It's cold outside. The canal is frozen and the streets are filled with people walking quickly,

their faces stern and tense. Inside there are flowers of frost on the windowpane. The stove pops away noisily in the corner. The radio plays a waltz. The clock on the wall says 7.30. The evening's only half over. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we're joined by the miracle of the internet and hot tubs by two new guests, Marie Phillips. Hello, Marie.

Hello. And Joe Dunthorne. Hello, Joe Dunthorne. Hello. How nice to see you both. Excellent. Joe Dunthorne is a, Joe Dunthorne. Hello. How nice to see you both. Excellent. Joe Dunthorne is a novelist and poet and was born and brought up in Swansea. His debut novel, Submarine, was translated into 20 languages and made into an award-winning film. His second novel, Wild Abandon, won the Society of Authors Encore Award. His latest is The Adulterants. His first collection of poems, O Positive, was published in 2019.

As was his tremendous short story, all the poems contained within will mean everything to everyone. The poetry published by Faber and Faber, the story by Rough Trade Books as one of their pamphlets. Now, I saw Joe read that story. I think you read it in its entirety.

It's so good, that story, Joe. Oh, thank you. Tell people if they don't know what the premise of that book is. I mean, it's a book, really. Thank you for calling it a book. It's only about 25 pages. But yeah, it's a short story that takes as its form the author bios at the back of a poetry anthology, I should say. And yeah, because I find that I'm always probably more drawn to the bios before the poems. So when I get an anthology, I kind of read through and judge the people prematurely.

So I just thought it'd be fun to try and turn that into a narrative form. We both endorse that strongly, don't we, Mitch? We do. Terrific little book. It's brilliant. So welcome, Joe. And welcome, Marie. Marie Phillips is an author whose works include the international bestseller, God's Behaving Badly, a first novel that was also translated

into 20 languages. So interestingly, not the same 20 languages Joe's also translated into 20 languages, though interestingly not the same 20 languages Joe's was translated into. The Table of Less Valued Nights was long listed for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction in 2015 and Oh, I Do Like to Be, a seaside reworking of Shakespeare's play The Comedy of Errors, was published by Unbound in 2019. Reviewing that book in The Spectator, Andy Miller called it quote, fast, clever and significantly funnier than the original. So utterly true. A quote that I have used. Good, good. That's why they're there. Marie is the co-writer of the BBC Radio 4 series War Horses of Letters

And she recently spent several years living in Drumroll Amsterdam Where she trained as a professional storyteller She now lives in London Were you in Amsterdam when all this started Or had you made it back? I moved back towards the end of 2019

So November 2019 And so back? I moved back towards the end of 2019, so November 2019. And so, of course, I moved back thinking, oh, this is going to be fantastic. I can't wait to do all kinds of London-y things. And then, what do you know, I then have been locked in the house pretty much ever since. And I put it to you that your decision to contribute to a program about the evenings by gerard raver is therefore not a coincidence uh because because as you said in your tweet uh about this particular book i i mean john i think is gonna is gonna set it up for us in a minute but the energy of reading this in may 2021 was was very strong i mean i'm sure it's strong whenever you read it but but what a perfect moment to read it yes i first read it a

number of years ago but um doing the reread was quite a different experience um and yes i do feel like it has special resonance uh our current times. Absolutely. Well, the book that Marie and Joe have chosen to talk about is The Evenings by the Dutch novelist Gerard Reva, first published in the Netherlands in 1947 by De Weze Gebe. It's a classic of modern Dutch literature set in Amsterdam during the final days of 1946. It's a first-person account of the life of Frits van Eegters, a 23-year-old office worker living an apparently ordinary life at home with

his parents, who were slowly driving him mad. One of the funniest and most original portraits of boredom ever written, the book has been compared to the work of Kafka, Beckett, J.D. Salinger and Karl Ove Klausgaard. Despite that, it took 70 years for it to appear in English, that edition published in 2016 by Pushkin Press in a translation by Sam Garrett. It appeared in 19 other languages first. Okay, but before we start kneading our toy rabbits, Andy, what have you been reading this week? Did you just say kneading? Do you mean kneading as in? As in, yeah, as in kneading.

Kneading bread. Yeah, like kneading bread. Kneading our toy rabbits. Yeah, I've been reading a book published by our friends at Uniform Books who are responsible for the, coincidentally for the book by Peter Blagvad, John, that you talked about a few weeks ago on here. And it's called Landscapes of Detectorists. And I think you might have mentioned that on the show as well. You might have mentioned this book as well.

It's a book about the landscapes and their usage and what they mean in the television series Detectorists. And I said before we started, I didn't want to spend ages saying how great Detectorist is, because I think everybody knows that. Situation comedy, it was on BBC Four, it made it into three seasons and a Christmas special. Toby Jones, Mackenzie Crook. It's terrific. It's funny. It's very of its moment. So I got this book off the shelf because I bought it a while ago and then hadn't hadn't read it but i sat down and read it from cover to cover and uh when you talked

about uh peter blagvad's book john imagine observe remember imagine observe remember that's the same show that i talked about uh a book about the fall that faber just published appropriately titled in the in the light of detectorists excavate that book is called excavate and one of the things that i said i liked about that book was how it wasn't afraid to come at the music of the fall from all manner of strange sometimes sometimes pretentious, often illuminating intellectual angles, and just really dive in and dig, in fact. And that's sort of the same here with Landscape of Detectorists. That's why I really love this book.

It's not in any way a script book or a making-of book. It does have a foreword by Mackenzie Crook and an afterword by adam tandy who was the original producer but actually it's a series of really interesting quite funny but thought-provoking essays about issues to do with the show detectorists and landscape so if I just give you a few of the titles of these essays, Hoarding the Everyday, The Disquieting Geographies of the Detectorists, that essay is sort of about the meaning of the fact that they keep digging up not hoards of treasure, but ring pools and old matchbox cars that you're living in a kind of, in the not-so-distant present, I believe is the term that they use.

And there's another essay here called That's Got to Be a First Woman Reads Map, Gender Hobbies and Knowledge in Detectorist, which is a really interesting look at the role of men and women in the show and how it relates to hobbies, specifically to hobbies, hobbies being a gendered occupation, or are they? So that's very interesting. But my favourite essay in here is by a guy called Andrew Harris. It's called When I Get Up, It Just Goes to Shit, Unearthing the Everyday Vertical Landscapes of Detectorists. And this is an essay which takes as its starting point the idea that for a show that is about digging down into the ground,

there's an awful lot of stuff that happens in it up in the air. So it's full of aerial shots and it's full of things, people looking up and it's full of, like in the third season, if you haven't seen it, the treasure isn't buried treasure. The treasure is high in a tree because some magpies have flown it up there. So it's a really playful look at the show from above rather than below. And I'll just read you a bit. And there's a sentence here which, like a field you could wander around in, is so delightful given that this is another British television programme

centred around its protagonists navigating between the surface and subsurface in search of that which has been lost or discarded. When Andy expresses doubt that the Wombles' home on Wimbledon Common is a real place, even when Lance carefully explains that the, quote, fictitious Wombles live fictitiously on the real-life Wimbledon Common, unquote, he's encouraged by Lance to Google it, but there is no signal out in the field, even with Andy holding his phone up to the sky.

Here comes the sentence, everybody. Wander around in this. This lack of reliable internet connection might seem incongruous given the importance of this past of East England for military operations. Yet, beyond their camouflage fleeces and late-night stakeout efforts, the detectorists are not integrated into the wider war machine, complete with its sophisticated aerial visions and surveying technologies. aerial visions and surveying technologies. Indeed, in the second episode of the first series, two fighter jets roar rapidly overhead while Lance and Andy, heads down and headphones on,

obliviously and unsuccessfully, search the ground. I think that's brilliant. I think that's just so much fun. Beyond their camouflage fleeces and late night stakeout efforts the detectorists are not integrated into the wider war machine i imagine when andy harris wrote that he had two marmite sandwiches in a bath to celebrate absolutely brilliant anyway so that's landscape with detectorists edited by innis m kiffrin Joanne Norcup, and that's published by Uniform Books. John, what have you been reading this week?

It's not a... You know, I hadn't really thought about it before we did this, but I've been reading a book by Bella Bathurst, just published profile books, called Fieldwork. And the subtitle is What Land Does to People and What People Do to Land. And it's a book about farmers and farming. Let's be honest, it's a very simple idea. You know, she moves to the country, like a lot of us have done, befriends a local farmer, and then becomes fascinated by how unlike the vision of

farming that she has in her head, the reality of farming is. It's a kind of invisible, sort of invisible workforce, an invisible kind of world that bubbles on underneath everything else. She said at one point, there's a lovely thing, she says that farming has become like the police. So it's sort of like middle-class people used to think that basically farmers were good without understanding anything about it. Now middle-class people think they're basically bad without understanding anything about it.

So she sets herself out to understand. So she goes all over the UK. She talks to people, slaughtermen in abattoirs. She talks to people who are fruit farmers. She talks to fallen stockmen. She talks to people, slaughter men in abattoirs. She talks to people who are fruit farmers. She talks to fallen stockmen. She talks to vets. There's a brilliant bit towards the end where she interviews the women who started the website Muddy Mates because, obviously,

finding a partner if you're a farmer is really difficult because the number of people on the land are dwindling. She's a very, very, very good interviewer and she's a very, very good writer. And she, I mean, I live, as you know, rurally and I've got lots of farming friends and I feel, I always feel slightly aggrieved when my metropolitan friends just kind of go on and on

about the rape of the countryside and the unfeeling kind of money-obsessed farmers. There's plenty of that around, but there are plenty of extraordinary people. And she manages to interview both ends of the scale. It's very, very good journalism reportage, and she has a kind of proper writer's grasp of the deeper things. So I'll read just a little bit.

Given what you've just read, I might just read a little bit from the end, because I think it's kind of the point of the whole book, really. And there's no spoilers, let's be honest. She doesn't come up with a solution to modern farming, which is, you know, basically, we're going to have to sort out farming, we're going to have to sort out our relationship with food. Because farmers have been asked to sort out our relationship with food because farmers have been asked to produce a lot of food very cheaply, which they've done. And guess what?

It's fucked up the environment and it's fucked up, in a lot of cases, their lives as well. So she's talking about Bert, who was the farmer that she rented to the farm. And his ability to see the place vertically has begun to trickle down, not just through a better understanding of all the uses this land has been put to, but through all the lives

which have long been spliced to it. This place is not just a farm or a view or a business, a classification or a record of all the attempts to pull money out of it. It is not just even a lineage of all the energy, human, animal, vegetative, changed in some way because of it. It's just itself. It just is. And beyond this hill, out there in the rest of Britain, Out there in the rest of Britain is another countryside.

Along the roads, billboards announce MOTs, nursery places, NFU insurance, and every lay-by harbours a lost Hermes driver. There's a bus stop with a broken shelter and a column of black smoke suggestive of burned carpets. There are boarded-up pubs, forestry operations and archaeological sites, signs informing the passing motorist that lane priorities have changed or Christ died. There are offers on windfall pairs and cockapoo pups, festoons of fresh electric fencing, discarded face masks and skeletal pylons. Empty industrial units square up the edges of the road, and the council announces roadworks to be started last year.

There are grit bins, dance classes, craft fairs and zip wires, CCTV in the trees, and a half-century of unmoved scrap. There are dead badgers ballooned by the side of the road, and a bouquet of barred feathers rising up from the tarmac. a bouquet of barred feathers rising up from the tarmac. And away and beneath, in the places the roads will never reach, an older, deeper country lives on, once in a while walking home through the blue of an autumn dusk, time skids sideways. The line of the oak, the flare of the bonfire, the deep beat of approaching horses belong to now and never and always, reminders of a wilder kind of land. There are still things hidden in the tangles of bracken and briar, kept safe in the hollows, waiting. And out beyond all of this is always a farm.

And in every farm there is something going on which isn't at all like you think it is. Every farm, there is something going on, which isn't at all like you think it is. This is like landscape of detectorists meets landscape of this country. Yeah, it kind of is. It could be landscape of this country. It's exactly right.

Who's it published by? It's published by Profile, and it's just out. And it's by Bella Barthurst, fieldwork, right? Yeah, sounds amazing. We'll be back in just a sec. John, would you like to know which deeply appropriate Dutch indigenous instruments we have just heard being played specially for us to start our chat about the evenings? No, go on. It's some sort of horn.

It's the Dutch midwinter horn. It's the Dutch midwinter horn. And the evenings is set in a 10-day period in the middle of winter, isn't it? It's the last days of 1946. Would you like to know how you make a midwinter horn? Go on. In the quiet of winter nights between Christmas and Twelfth in east holland one may hear the nostalgic notes of the mid i'm not making this up this is that's a real thing the midwinter horn a small alder log

is split and the pith is removed from the two halves whereupon the halves are bound together again a mouthpiece of elderwood is inserted and water is poured through the hollow. The wood swells and the water freezes in the December night and the primitive tube produces a sweet tone. So it's an organically grown thing that the Dutch only play in midwinter, right? And I thought, what a metaphor for this novel. It's like this strange honking from the middle of winter in Holland. I don't know where to start, really. Why don't we start by asking Joe,

The Evenings by Gerard Re... No, in fact, I'm going to ask Marie. Please confirm for us the pronunciation of this author's name. Gerard Reva. Gerard Reva. Gerard Reva. Never going to be. I don't think it's really going to help.

I think if you go with Gerard Reva, that's probably close enough. Reva's good. Reva. Appropriate. Yes. For the first of many apologies to our dutch listeners they're they're going to be hearing tonight gerard reva how's that that's not bad that's not excellent so joe when did you first read the evenings by gerard reva i believe rather

boringly i was sent it by pushkin press who hoped i might like it and i liked it. And that is the end of my, but then I read the, when they came out, the novellas and read as much as I could bear of Parents Worry, which is his 90s novel. We'll come to that. But did you know anything? I mean,

we're going to talk about how famous he was and is in the Netherlands, but had you ever heard of him? Did you know anything about him? I didn't know anything about him, no. I do love, like you, I do love novels about boredom, so that was instantly appealing, but I didn't know anything about his insane life until later. Well, we've got plenty to dig into over the next hour or so. Marie, when did you first read The Evenings or anything by Reva? The Evenings is my first Reva and it was given to me by my then boyfriend when I was living in Amsterdam. So I was living out there with my partner at the time who is Dutch. I'm slightly concerned about how our Dutch readers are going to feel about some

things I'm going to say, but it is possible that I may have expressed some doubt about the Dutch sense of humour at some point in my relationship. I cannot confirm nor deny. Anyway, so David, my boyfriend, gave me this book as evidence in favour of the Dutch sense of humour. And I think quite conclusively won that argument because it's hilarious. And so the book is very much for me associated with the time that I spent living in Amsterdam. And of course, it was the perfect, it was a Christmas present as well, which makes it even more apt. The most Christmassy book ever written. Well, it's not exactly festive, is it? But it is certainly Christmassy.

If anyone can imagine having a boring Christmas with one's parents, then they will relate to this book. You do read Dutch. Your Dutch is okay. It's pretty good. I don't tend to read in Dutch just because I find that I miss a lot of the nuance because although I understand Dutch pretty well, I think that when I'm reading novels, I like to really know for sure why the author chose one word and not another.

And so I can understand it, but I feel like on the whole, something is missing for me. If when I read in the original language, which I think is the opposite of what a lot of people say about reading in the original, but I find that I just don't really know the difference between certain synonyms, for example. So I read it in English. difference between certain synonyms, for example. So I read it in English. And could we just impress upon people, our non-Dutch listeners, could you both impress upon people how well known this book is in the Netherlands? It's huge. Wasn't it voted the greatest Dutch novel ever? Or was it the 20th century? Anyway, it's up there as among the great

Dutch novels. I think it was voted the greatest of the 20th century and the third best of all time. Third best of all time. Okay. Yeah. So by our standards, this is a backlisted title here in recording in the UK. But in Europe, and specifically in the Netherlands, this is a really famous book. This is like, I mean, I was trying to think what the equivalent would be, John, if we were, if a Dutch literary podcast were recording an episode about the little known book, Birdsong by Sebastian Fox. Or Brideshead Revisited or something, you know,

a big kind of classic post-war English novel that everybody's supposed to have read. The point is when it was first published in Holland, it was both a scandal and a bestseller. And it's seen as being one of the most important novels in Dutch literature in the 20th century. So it's really, and he was, as we'll talk about, he was a great beast of Dutch letters, wasn't he?

I mean, he's like a terrifying man. We'll talk about that as well. John Mitchinson, why did it take until 2017 then for this? Why did it take 70 years for this novel to appear in an English translation? I honestly don't know. I mean, it's surprising to me that it didn't get translated sooner. Apparently it's been numerously attempted. Yeah, that people tried it.

Right, Lydia Davis tried it. There's something about the, I mean, I can't read Dutch, but apparently there's something about the various registers of the language. That's right, the language itself is really, really difficult. Including this religious language, which he uses a lot of, that made it very, very difficult to replicate. But if you think, you know, they were able to translate Harry Moolish and the works of, you know, all the works of Seys No Te Boman. I mean, plenty of Dutch complicated,

difficult Dutch novels got translated. It's really interesting. Well, why don't we do a quick compare and contrast? We have the great good fortune, Marie's very valiantly going to read us the first paragraph of the evenings in Dutch, and then Joe is going to read us the equivalent paragraph in English. in de vroege morgen van de 22e december 1946 in onze stad, op de eerste verdieping van het huis Schilderskade 66, de held van deze geschiedenis, Frits van Echters, ontwakte. Hij keek op zijn lichtgevend horloge dat aan een spijker hing. Kwaad voor zes, mompelde hij, het is nog nacht. Hij vreed zich in het gezicht. Wat een ellendige droom, dacht hij. Waar ging het over? Langzaam kon hij zich de inhoud te binnen brengen.

Hij had gedroomd dat de huiskamer vol bezoek was. Het wordt dit weekend goed weer, zei iemand. He had dreamed that the living room was full of visitors. It will be good weather this weekend, someone said. At the same moment, a man came in with a bowl of goods. No one paid attention to him and greeted him by no one, but Frits looked at him sharply. Suddenly, the visitors fell with a heavy bandage on the ground. that's brilliant please do not write in with your pronunciation corrections which i'm sure will be many joe please can you possibly match i really can't and i'm just intimidated by the fact i even have to say his name, the main character's name now. Now I've heard Marie deliver it correctly.

Anyway, it was still dark in the early morning hours of the 22nd of December 1946 on the second floor of the house at Schilderskade 66 in our town when the hero of this story, Fritz van Ektes, awoke. He looked at the luminous dial of his watch, hanging on its nail. A quarter to six, he mumbled. It's still night. He rubbed his face. What a horrible dream, he thought. What was it again?

Gradually, it came back to him. He had dreamt that the living room was full of visitors. It's going to be a glorious weekend, someone said. At that same moment, a man in a bowler hat walked in. No one paid him any heed and no one greeted him, but Fritz eyed him closely. Suddenly, the visitor fell to the floor with a thud. Wow. Slightly patronising round of applause. Wow. Slightly patronising round of applause. Yeah, slightly patronising. I'll take it.

So what's going on there? Marie, what is it about the prose that makes it tricky to carry across into English? I have to say, as regards this opening paragraph, pretty much absolutely nothing. I think it's completely straightforward Dutch. I do know that the Dutch are very fond of claiming that their language is impossible. And I've had people say that to me very often when I'm learning Dutch, very proudly. Oh, it's very difficult, isn't it? And I think, well, okay,

not if you speak English and a bit of German, it's not too bad. But because I translated another passage of a different of his letters, which we might get onto later. And he does use some really kind of fruity expressions, interesting choices of words. And he uses little religious phrases sometimes in the middle of his sentences. But I cannot explain it from my own reading. I cannot explain why people think that this is so difficult. And actually, my suspicion is it's not so much about the language and the prose. It's about the sheer Dutchness of the

content that they are afraid that people will get wrong because this is so utterly immersed in Dutch culture. And I think that is the key thing. Okay. That's interesting. It's that thing about it. I mean, one of the comparison points always is catcher in the rye. And it struck me that getting that tonal Holden Caulfield thing, you know, that sort of slangy, that sort of tone between, it's not, the evenings is clearly different.

But I can imagine, you know, they have that, I mean, from what I've, you know, what I've read is that they have that, it's a sort of evening's tone or an evening's humour that they talk about. It kind of, it defined a particular way, a worldview of looking at the world. And I can imagine that that is, to get that into English effectively is a real challenge for a translator. I think you feel that way about any book that is so clearly a voice book. And this, I mean, I think the translation is amazing in English and it has its own voice. Whether that perfectly replicates the Dutch, I don't know. But, you know, like Catcher in the Rye,

there is this kind of inimitable voice coming through that you feel like, oh, I haven't heard this before, but this feels completely fully formed and engaging. Yeah. He does a really interesting thing. It struck me as one of the hallmarks of of the style of the voice in the book is there's a lot of dialogue often seemingly quite banal or cruel or a bit of both and then an internal voice disagreeing with the thing that's just been said. That struck me as reading it in translation is one of the very distinctive things.

So he'll say, oh, you know, look at those warts. Yes. You should get your warts sorted out. And then I think, should he though? I'm not sure. Why did I say that? But isn't that the thing that makes, I think without those inner monologue moments of him being like why am i saying this i'm a terrible person which happened a lot i think without that it would be such a brutal and unbearable book it's like the voice of the reader in those moments going please can someone step in and like say that this conversation is not right and then he himself steps in and says i shouldn't be saying

this yeah so normally we would try and give you an idea of what happens in the book but almost nothing happens in this book that's part of the appeal of it they eat they hang around waiting for the evening and then then he has a nightmare as a relief from nothing that's happened all day. But for British listeners particularly, John and I both came up with this point of comparison separately. We're just going to play you a clip from a 1950s radio show, which reading the evenings really reminded us both of. Oh dear, oh dear Oh dear me

What's the time? Two o'clock Is that all? Oh, I'm fed up Oi What? Why don't'm fed up. Oi. What? Why don't you shut up, Moaning, and let me get on with the paper? Well, I'm fed up.

So you just said. Well, so I am. Look, so am I fed up, and so is Bill fed up. We're all fed up, so shut up, Moaning, and make the best of it. You sure it's only two o'clock? No, it's one minute past two now. One minute past two. And the time drag.

Oh, I do hate Sundays. I'll be glad when it's over. Drives me up the wall just sitting here looking at you lot. Why don't you men go out for a walk while I wash up the dishes? Why don't you go for a walk? Go on up it. There'll be one less to look at all day. That's a clip from the brilliant Sunday afternoon at home.

Genius. Hancock's Half Hour, written by Gautam Simpson. Tony Hancock, Sid James, Bill Kerr and Hattie Jakes there. Tony Hancock, Sid James, Bill Kerr and Hattie Jakes there. It struck me, Marie, that The Evenings as there is rather like the stuff of sitcom. It's people trapped in a place bickering. But it is funny, right? It's extremely funny.

And I'm embarrassed to admit I haven't listened to all of Hancock's Half Hour. So that was a new one on me. And as I was listening to it, it's so close to the tone. It was interesting. All I really remembered from my first reading was him in the house with his parents. Like there's quite a lot of other stuff in the book where work and time to sort of go out and have a drink. Of just him sitting at home, either alone or with his mum and dad, getting more and more irritated by the tiny little things that they do. And I spent the first two months of lockdown living with my mum and dad. And I actually accidentally left this book behind with them. And my mum, I called, I asked her if I could have it back. And she called me up and said, I had a little look in that book of yours before sending it to you. She said, it's us. It's us! I can't believe it! And yeah, it's the repetition, as you say in sitcom, the inability to escape, the feeling of being trapped in this situation

that never really changes. As you say, we've all been in an unfunny sitcom for the last year. The extent to which everyone in this novel gets on everybody else's nerves seem very true to the the historical moment we're living through now absolutely and and there's well there's all this stuff i guess around food about watching his parents eating which is rings very true when you haven't left the house much in a year. And, you know, the way his father uses his own spoon to get the sugar out of the sugar bowl. And he's watching, he's going to do it again. And he's got this internal monologue.

He's waiting for it. Here it comes, here it comes. And then he does it. He's done it. It's a great relief. He did do it. And it's amazing how that escalates throughout the book and is sustained, that it really becomes madness-inducing, which is very relatable.

I love books where I can't see how the trick is done. And I couldn't understand why I didn't just want to fling the book across the room. And it's great about the weather, isn't it? He's good about those loops that we get into the weather. In fact, his father always asks him every time he comes back into the house if there's anything interesting that's been going on. And he's always trying out new kind of ways of dealing with that very dull question. And the half-glimpsed bits of the parents' marriage that you hear,

that you never quite fully understand what the beef is between them. It's so, so like living at home. As you say, why isn't it terrible? Why is it funny? It's brilliant writing. I think there's just something extremely truthful about this book. I mean, we talk a lot about books, in books, about wanting characters to be likeable. I've always thought that's a red herring. I think what we want is to understand characters. What we want is to get why they are the way that they are. And I think the genius of Reva in this book, and I would also say in Werther Nieland, which is his book, the first of the two childhood novellas, is he's so honest about himself and about his worst impulses. And he makes himself very vulnerable in that way.

And I think that as a reader, if we're truthful, we all have those terrible impulses. We're all watching our friends or our parents do that desperately annoying thing and fighting our urge to point it out or possibly pointing it out and then feeling bad about it. and fighting our urge to point it out or possibly pointing it out and then feeling bad about it. And so I think it's the way that he doesn't try to do anything other than present himself truthfully that allows us to really be on his side. Have either of you got an example from the novel of, you know, him being irritated with a particular thing or.

Yes, I can read a little passage where he is watching his parents eat soup. I mean, no one wants to watch anyone eat soup. Let me just find. Here we go. The meal began with soup. Fritz tapped his fork against the rim of his bowl, raised the tines to his ear and made a humming sound. So, he sang loudly.

He repeated it twice and looked at his father. The man raised his eyebrows. Almighty Christ, Fritz thought. They're slurping. Both of them are slurping. Now they can still pretend that this is because the soup is hot, although that is really no excuse. But later on, they will keep on slurping because that's easier.

Could it really be easier? He picked up his fork again, tapped it against his bowl, held it to his ear and sang loudly in a low voice. So. Repetition is a big thing I like and repetition is a big part of this book. You know, the fact that the structure is 10 days. You're locked into a 10 day structure, aren't you? 10 chapters, 10 days. You're locked into a 10-day structure, aren't you? 10 chapters, 10 days, nothing happens

differently every time. And then you reboot and you start again the next day. That's right. And very well chosen days as well, being the run-up to New Year's Eve, because then you get that famously abstract and unknowable passage from the 26th of December to New Year's Eve, when all time seems to melt away and nothing makes sense. It feels like that's the perfect time to be setting this book about. I think he's a real master of time. The way that he writes about time is really striking. And in particular, the way that he constantly tells you what time it is. This is a book in which you will never be in any doubt as to what the exact time of day is. And also, for that matter, how much hair the person

that he is talking to still has on his head. It's an amazing book about baldness and perceptions of baldness, right? And I think that brings it back again to that lockdown feeling, because who among us has not obsessively checked the time and sort of had that feeling of like, it's half past six, can I go to bed now or do I have to really push on through another four hours of empty time. That is the Dutch folk song, In Winter When It Rains. I'll tell you how that translates.

In winter when it rains, then those paths are deep, yes deep, then that little fisherman comes, all fishing in that reed with his living stick, with his bow, with his ragbag, with his knapsack, with his learning, with his leather jacket. And the reason I chose that is because it's about midwinter again. It's another winter, another Dutch musical winter interlude, winterlude. Also because I want to talk a bit about Reva himself

and his leather jacket and how incredibly famous and scandalous he was in the Netherlands during his lifetime. You know, the authors that he, the figures he reminds me of are Huysmans in France, or Serge Gainsbourg in France, actually, or Thomas Bernhardt in Austria. And Reva in the Netherlands seems to have the same thing going on. He's a provocateur. He hates the Netherlands.

he hates the netherlands but the netherlands is the only place he can be the great right because he he after the success of the evenings he moves to the uk for five years to try and make a go of it by writing in English, but it doesn't happen, does it? Yes, that's right. When he gets to London, he turns up at Angus Wilson's house, unannounced, a writer who he loves. And he is quoted as saying, Sir, I am a Dutchman who started writing English two years ago. I read some of your work. I just came to see you and I don't come for any money, food or assistance whatsoever, which is a very charming way to start a relationship. And they did become friends. And Angus, I think, tried to help him with his work in English. And he published a number of stories in the Paris Review and had some success. And then there is a book of his English stories out, but it never kind of happened

for him. And he ended up going back to Holland where things were happening. He goes back to Holland, doesn't he? And we're going to get onto his blasphemy trial in a moment. This is his blasphemy trial. But Marie, he's almost liberated by his failure in the UK, right? When he gets back to Holland, he starts writing in a different,

more obscene, yet more sacred register. One of the really key things that happens is he comes out as gay. And he starts writing in a very unapologetic way about his homosexuality. And I think he's the, if I'm correct, he's the first out Dutch gay writer. So that becomes more and more central to his work. And at the same time, he also converts to Catholicism. And there becomes this kind of combination of sort of writing about gay sex, but also writing about his devotion to God or his complaints towards God, and also his sadomasochism. And all of these things come together in ways that I suppose it's not that surprising that some people find it awkward, shall we say, or worse

than awkward, but it certainly becomes an increasing signature in his writing. Yeah. Yeah. It's true with Parents Worry, I struggle with that. I can't fault it for its brilliant depiction of his state of mind when trying to create. But he also seems to have, he seems to deliberately enjoy having no self-edit button on letting you know every single unworthy and obscene and illegal thought that might be going through his head. It's so funny and yet deeply shocking, that novel. And it was published, it was the only other novel of his published in English in 1990.

I mean, that was quite recent. I can't imagine it being published here now. Can you? A hundred percent not. I find it so unlike the early work. You know, The Evenings is shocking. It's got some really disturbing passages in it. But this felt like it was drilling into that darkness in a way that was on another level.

I couldn't get through it, I confess. I paused in my reading. You paused. But Marie, you've got something for us. You've translated something specially for Batlisted. What is it? This is an extract from a book, a non-fiction book by Reva, which is called Op Wechner Het Einde, which means On the Way to the End. And it's a selection of sort of essays and letters that he wrote. Quite a few of them are about his travels to the UK. So when I was trying to learn how to read Dutch, this is one of the books that I used for practice.

It's the very first thing, the very first adult book I ever read in Dutch. And the very first bit of it, which describes Reva on his way to a writer's conference in Edinburgh on a cross channel ferry. And I set myself the challenge of translating it, which, as we've heard, translations of Braver is considered to be some high, high difficulty stuff. So, again, I can only apologise for what I've done to this. He used to complain a lot about his translators because his English was so good. But fortunately for us, he is now deceased. I find myself in the first class lounge of the night boat to Harwich, which will depart shortly before midnight in about an hour. A boy about 17 years old in faded blue hitchhiker's clothes enters the lounge,

stays seated for a while, eats an apple and speaks to his travelling companion, who is as ugly as he is heartbreakingly beautiful, in a jerky, hoarse stream of words that forces me to breathe faster and deeper. Fortunately, he does not change his clothing, nor does he do anything about his hair, which rain and wind have perfectly arranged above his grey eyes. My Prince Charming reclines on one of the black leather sofas, and this is when the waiter has to intervene. Does the gentleman have a cabin? No. Is he travelling first class? No. And he can only stay here if he pays a 16 shilling supplement, or for a few shillings more, he can rent a bed.

The second bed in my cabin is unoccupied. A daydream rushes through me, an evening dream, a sea dream. But how am I supposed to get him through all those corridors where at each intersection a different sick penguin is waiting behind a table filled with tickets, numbers and keys? The boy grins cheekily, disappears of his travelling companion and now I'm off to bed. Not my choice, but your will be done. Whenever I have shared a cabin on a ship with someone else, it has always been with a young man, well under 30, of course, but already with a thick, expressionless face, deathly white skin under two layers of underwear, a very bad figure, a nasty smell of the sea, and a spotted neckerchief, with no origin, no purpose, and no understanding of any of my comments or communications,

so that in the end I turn more and more towards the belief that they are dead, condemned by vengeful land gods to sail the seas by night for all eternity. It is better to have a cabin alone than to share it with such ominous folk. The ship starts to vibrate. I bolt the door, crawl under the covers and try and dispel a rebellious thought, but am unable to prevent myself from speaking it out loud. When you redeemed mankind, why didn't you include me? Wasn't it all supposed to happen in one go? didn't you include me wasn't it all supposed to happen in one go oh it's brilliant thanks brilliant well done brilliant what i think is so interesting about that is the mixture of the sacred and the profane you know the highly sexualized catholicism is the thing that does for him when he's put on trial for blasphemy.

And I've got here his novel Nearer to Thee, which has yet to be translated into English. Did you translate this, Joe? This little bit is an amalgamation. I couldn't find that whole passage translated, but I could find two halves and I put them together. This is the thing that lands him up in court in the Netherlands, tried for blasphemy. And already you can tell this is so distinctively his later voice.

And God himself would visit me in the form of a one-year-old mouse-grey donkey and stand in front of my door and ring the bell and say, Gerard, that book of yours, did you know that I wept while reading some of its passages? My Lord and my God, praised be to your name to all eternity, I love you so immensely, I would try to say, but would burst out crying halfway and start to kiss him and pull him inside. And after a colossal climb up the stairs to the little bedroom, I would possess him three times and at great length in his secret opening and afterwards give him a free copy of my book.

Not in paperback, but in hardcover. No frugality or stuffiness with the dedication to the infinite without words. Not only is it sacred and profane, it's also highly sexual, highly specific, but he also plays it for laughs. That thing about, and afterwards, give him a free copy of my book, not in paperback, in hardcover. Do you think that is a reason why we have yet to see in English certain of his later novels? By 1983, when Paul Verhoeven is adapting The Fourth Man for film. And so The Fourth Man was a huge international hit. And it's based on a book that hasn't been translated that I haven't read.

So I have to assume, well, there's no way that you can assume actually, which parts of it are Paul Verhoeven and which parts are Gerard Reva, but they're both provocateurs. I mean, it's a perfect marriage. And the main character is called Gerard Reva and is a bisexual alcoholic author. And the whole thing is this kind of crazy fever dream, which if you've, once you've read some of his stuff, you're sort of thinking, yes, this seems pretty autobiographical, even though the entire thing is this sort of insane fantasy. But there's one moment in it where Raver is in a church and he fantasises that on the crucifix is a gorgeous young man

in tight swimwear and he goes up and fondles this man's crotch so by 1983 that can be put into a dutch film which then goes on to to have international success and as an aside is remade as basic instinct in the original it's about gerald raver falling in love with a woman who may or may not be a serial killer and in the remake it's also about it's about michael douglas falling in love with a woman who may or may not be a serial killer but in the remake which is also by paul verhoeven it's woman, Sharon Stone, who's also the bisexual author. Oh my God. So in fact, Gerard Raver is the model for Sharon Stone's character in Basic History,

which covers a bit of a surprise to me. But yes, in terms of the blasphemy, it was so much part of his public persona that this was able to be to be put into a film and it passes it doesn't perturb anyone apparently well his public persona is a really interesting thing that's one of the other things about reva which he's incredibly modern because he's one of the first he's and again very like Bernhardt, very like Huysmans or Gansburg. They are very aware of their own value as a public figure. And one of the things I found out today about Rafer is the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam owns 500 of his author photos.

500 different ones taken at different times in his career. I tweeted a few of them earlier. We'll put them on the Instagram. They are incredible pictures. Amazing. They're so rock and roll. They're all from the late 60s. Fish eye lens, posing with some teddy bears on his bed.

Oh, it's so unsavoury. Anyway. Did they have the one of him kissing the donkey? Did you see that? Yes, yes. I think he's a real Dutch eccentric. The Dutch do like what they call their bekende Nederlanders, which means they're well-known Dutch people.

And the sort of definition of Dutch celebrity is surprisingly broad. If you watch a celebrity game show in the Netherlands, there's likely to be sort of, I don't know, like an opera director and a sort of notable journalist. It's not kind of people who are on Love Island. They just love anyone remotely notable. And I find that his notoriety is sort of rooted in the everyday and it's rooted in these found objects,

which also sort of pepper his books as well. Like he's always, his characters are always gathering objects, little everyday objects from here and there. So in the evenings, there's the little rabbit or the little aluminium cup. And in Verton, Nyland, he finds a gramophone horn in a ditch and is very excited by that. Or he's always hiding little objects here and there. And there's something, it's very appropriate that in his author photographs, he's surrounded by all of these things because he builds his worlds

from these objects that he has found, these found objects. And stories, the book is kind of a collection. Fritz, the character in the evenings, has got this almost limitless kind of supply of gruesome stories, often to do with the deaths of children. And he loves the kind of, you know, father drops child and child dies, screams, wife comes in. And while the wife has come in and screams because there's a dead child on the floor the little girl drowns in the bath or the one where he's he's picked a child up and the spine is snapped or the head can't work out how the kid has died so he does it to his other kid and he said well at least we knew no knew how the first kid died it's so dark

i'm glad that you're telling those stories john it felt like i was you read those passages and you're like yes that is funny but i do not want to be the person who has to kind of retell them he has this kind of compulsion and that's the thing that you know you're thinking about kind of holden caulfield again it's just there is that compulsion he can't shut up he can't he doesn't know when to stop there's a lot of picking of teeth picking of noses there's a passage where he describes warts in all their various forms there's another bit where he he has a discussion of his mother's where's the appropriate place to wipe your snot once you've picked your nose he's got a taste for the abject.

Even his father cleaning his pipe, he manages to make this a kind of really obscene kind of operation. It's just the detail, the detail in it. The pores on everyone's faces, everyone's hairlines, the coarse texture of people's hair. It's just, yeah, he's got a kind of microscopic. Terrible, terrible story about the guy who shits into his coat and then it freezes and then they put him into the bath to defrost. It's like, why do we need this story at this point?

Well, the good news, everybody, is there's a twist because we're going to talk about the ending now. Now, you might want to fast forward the next five minutes we can't talk about this novel without talking about the ending of the novel and before we start we're going to actually hear gerald reva himself reading the final few lines the utterly sublime final few lines of The Evenings. And then Joe is going to read us something from the ending and we'll talk a bit about why it's so important to the novel as a whole. Het jaar is er niet meer. Konijn, ik ben levend. Ik adem en ik beweeg, dus ik leef.

Is dat duidelijk? Welke beproevingen ook komen, ik leef. Hij zoog de borst vol adem en stapte in bed. Het is gezien, mompelde hij. Het is niet So what you've just heard is a man experiencing a moment of pure epiphany while he talks to a little toy rabbit. It's really amazing and interesting because the early reviews were so blindsided by the other elements of this novel, its darkness and its bitterness and the nasty jokes, that a lot of the early reviews completely missed the fact that it ends with the religious epiphany, which is one of the most strange and unusual ones I've ever read. I'm going to read a little passage where he's talking about his parents again, who, as we've talked about, he's very annoyed by. But at this point,

that annoyance is kind of transcending into just real empathy for them, as well as still finding them annoying. Eternal, only, almighty our God, he he said quietly fix your gaze upon my parents see them in their need do not turn your eyes from them listen he said my father slurps when he drinks he dishes up sugar with his dessert spoon he takes the meat between his fingers he breaks wind without anyone having asked him to do so. He has the remains of food between his molars. He does not know where the gilder is supposed to go. When he peels his eggs, he does not know what to do with the shells. He asks in English whether there is anything new and interesting to report. He mashes together all the food on his plate.

Everlasting Lord, I know that it has not gone unseen he mislays postage stamps not on purpose he actually mislays them you can't find them and that's all that matters he wipes his fingers on his clothes he turns off the radio if i play around with the fork he thinks i've gone mad and he spears things from off the platter that is unclean and he often goes without a tie. Yet great is his goodness. And he goes on to list his mother's flaws in the same way, before, in a really, really beautiful way, describing his love for them and viewing them as flawed, beautiful humans like we all are. And it is an amazing, really moving and surprising end to the novel. The last few lines where he says, the year is no more. Rabbit, I am alive. I breathe. I move. So I live. Marie, that is the thing I found incredibly moving to read in May 2021. You know, to read a novel that's about being trapped and then having this moment of epiphany at the very end. He survives it and he also bears witness to it literally through writing the book.

And then also just as the character, the character who has not written the book, but who has seen, who's just seen his parents for who they really are. He's seen himself, he's seen his friends, and he invites God to see them. And he says that it has not gone unnoticed. And there's something in that sense of sometimes, yes, life is very boring, very repetitive, very difficult, very sad, but we bear witness to it we are still alive we have survived and that is extremely moving at the moment and really at any time that also has something presumably john to do with the second world war yeah i mean this is a novel written in amsterdam yeah in a country ravaged by the second world war it barely mentions

the war no but presumably it has some kind of deep resonance to people who've lived in a climate of repression and fear to still be there i breathe and i I think that is the thing, isn't it? The breath at the end really felt sort of chiming with a kind of late Beckett feeling in him with everything stripped away. It's just him on his bed breathing and feeling, I mean, perhaps more than Beckett would, but just the very fact that he's still able to do that

means that he's survived it all. But that word unnoticed is really interesting. It's just, it has been seen. It has not gone unnoticed. It's really powerful. But, you know, whatever there is, you know, you can't not be. That's an amazing end to a novel. This is the moment where he finally kind of, he cracks open and he's able to view his parents with the love that he knows they deserve. But

his personality, his cynical personality is, for 99% of the book, unable to offer them this goodwill. And here he manages it. What's really striking is he writes the parts that any other writer would leave out. So it's not that Fritz is never going to have anything happen in his life. And maybe he'll get married or maybe he'll have children or he'll get another job. And he's just been through World War II. So stuff happened then. But instead of choosing to tell a story about eventful periods in his life, he chooses to tell the story about a time when really nothing was happening at all. And yet, those times when really nothing is happening at all, is really the meat of a lot of time, we spend more time picking our teeth than we spend falling in love, you know. So there's something in his choice to notice all of these small things. I've got a quote here from Walter Benjamin. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.

A rustling in the leaves drives it away that's very good you know that's sort of what this novel is isn't it it's a kind of you would not catch the moment at the end if too much happened it would it would spook and it would go another reason listeners why you should finish books. This is a very good example of that, I'm afraid. And now, enlightened, we must leave Fritz in his room to his chreveries and lucubrations. Huge thanks to Marie and Joe for introducing us

to the dark yet compelling word of chirad chrever. To Nicky Birch for weaving all our frequencies into a harmonious hour of heavy entertainment and to Unbound for all the pickled herring. You can download all 138 previous episodes

of Backlisted plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website backlisted.fm and we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter and Facebook

and now in sound and pictures on Instagram too. You can show your love directly by supporting our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted. We aim to survive without paid for advertising. Your generosity helps us do that. All patrons get to hear Backlisted episodes early. And for less than a stack of aluminium beakers at the House of Gifts, lock listeners get two extra lock listeds a month,

our version of a dingy Dutch bedroom, where we go to play records, read books, watch films, and dream lurid dreams to share with you all. Lock listeners also get to hear their names read out on the show as a mark of our thanks and appreciation. And this week's batch are Felicity Green, Madeleine Sedenberg, Helen Stanton,

Robert Bresnan, Faye Young, Russell Oxley, Kirstie Dool, Patsy Lyle. That's all for now. Thank you for listening and for your support.

We'll be back in a fortnight. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.