Foto de l'autor

Willem Du Gardijn

Autor/a de Het einde van het lied

4 obres 13 Membres 3 Ressenyes

Sobre l'autor

Inclou aquests noms: Willem Jardin, Willem du Gardijn

Obres de Willem Du Gardijn

Het einde van het lied (2021) 6 exemplars
Bevrijding roman 4 exemplars
Monografie van de mond (2008) 2 exemplars
Negen raven : verhalen (2011) 1 exemplars

Etiquetat

Coneixement comú

Altres noms
Jardin, Willem
Data de naixement
1964
Gènere
male
Nacionalitat
Netherlands

Membres

Ressenyes

Marguerite Yourcenar abandons the emperor Hadrian at his villa in Tibur a few weeks before his death in the year 138. Most of us are probably prepared to take those last few weeks on trust, but the recently widowed classics teacher Adriaan — first-person narrator of the centre section of this triptych and implied narrator of the other two parts — is not. He goes to the Bay of Naples to discover where exactly Hadrian was when he died — we know he travelled to Baiae, but to which house there? — and to supply the "missing" chapter of Yourcenar's book.

Obviously a big part of the point of this book is to confront the challenging imaginative problem of how to write about the moment of death from the point of view of the person dying, something writing tutors tell you to stay away from, as it's an experience that it's logically impossible for anyone to report. But of course it's also an experience we all face, and most of us will surely have attempted to imagine what it might be like. Du Gardijn's narrator has to meet the challenge twice: once in free indirect speech for his wife Aimée, and once in first-person for Hadrian.

The centre section, where Adriaan is researching Hadrian, carefully undermines his reliability as a narrator enough to make us go back and think about what we've just read: can we take a bereaved husband's word for what was going on in the mind of his depressed spouse? How much of Hadrian is Adriaan, how much is Yourcenar, how much is authentic? And of course, how much of Adriaan is the author? The "present day" part of the story is set back to somewhere in the 1980s or 90s to separate the two of them by at least one generation (and to make the research more interesting by eliminating mobile phones and internet...).

I think the danger with a book like this must be that all three parts individually end up rather like pastiches of well-worn situations: the middle-class woman having a mental health crisis, the author in search of a story, and the philosophical classical old-timer elegantly meeting the end of his life. But we get just enough entertaining details in each part to keep us on our toes — the music of Federico Mompou in part one, the chaos of Naples in part two, and the reality of the Roman roads in part three.
… (més)
 
Marcat
thorold | Hi ha 1 ressenya més | Jul 13, 2023 |
I don't often rush to read new Dutch novels in the week they are released (in fact, I've never done so before, although I probably should), but in this case, I happen to know the author, and was curious to see what sort of a book he's written...

This is an unusually complicated and ambitious book for a first novel. The book seems to be setting out to explore how we are affected by the way our bodies interact with the world around us, in particular through the mouth (although the hair and skin also play a large part).

There are two self-contained, but inter-related, stories: in the first part, we have the first-person narrative of Paul Heineman, a historian who lives in Amsterdam; in the second we have a third-person narrative from the point-of-view of Paul's older brother Frank, a political philosopher with a junior post at Columbia University in New York. Before, after, and between these texts are essays (the monographs) in which the author looks in a more direct way at the mouth, hair and skin.

I'm very grateful to Willem Jardin for encouraging me to read W.G. Sebald, but he only has himself to blame (!) if I say that Paul's story and the monographs reminded me very much of Sebald's technique. Obvious things, like the use of first-person and the photographs in the text, but also more subtle parallels like the extended architectural metaphor. Paul wants to write a thesis based on his grandfather's experiences as a forced labourer in Germany during the war, and subsequently as a meat inspector in the Amsterdam abattoir; when he fails to find a supervisor, he diverts his efforts into building a model of the abattoir. The abattoir complex is described in ways that make us see the parallels between the industrialised brutality of the meat industry and that of the Nazis (I'm oversimplifying here - Jardin does all sorts of other clever things with this metaphor - it's not a piece of crude vegetarian propaganda, but a sensitive examination of how we relate to meat, eating, dentistry, hygiene, death, ...).

Foucault doesn't seem to be mentioned, but I'm sure he's in there somewhere as well, particularly in the second monograph where there is a lot about the justice system acting on hair and skin.

Where Paul's narrative is largely concerned with himself and his increasingly obsessive association with his grandfather's story, Frank's is chiefly about his relationship with Naomi, a philosophy student. The central conceit here is that they use philosophy as a sophisticated form of foreplay, lecturing each other, undressed, on Nietzsche, Hegel and Hannah Arendt from an improvised lectern in the bedroom. A little of this goes a long way, of course: we are fortunately spared the full text of the lectures, but it does give room for a lot of interesting discussion of the relationship between ideas and physical intimacy. Since it all happens against the backdrop of Manhattan landmarks, I found it difficult to resist imaging Woody Allen and Diane Keaton (ca. 20 years ago) as Frank and Naomi. I'm sure that's not what the author intended [I asked: it isn't].

The climax of Frank's narrative is a brilliant set-piece, the Veterans' Day parade, which becomes almost as effective and complex a metaphor as the abattoir.

I found this an enjoyable and challenging read: my Dutch is a bit hit and miss, and I've never studied philosophy. so I certainly missed some of the subtleties. I look forward to coming back to the book and discovering more.

One irritation, which spoilt the last few pages for me: having a background in physical science, it really upsets me when someone quotes a "mathematical" equation full of undefined or unquantifiable parameters. If D is "diagnosis" and B "treatment", how can D/B possibly have a value? But that's just my pedantic instinct kicking in: there's a perfectly good literary reason for putting the formula in there, which has nothing to do with the numbers (you have to see it!).
… (més)
 
Marcat
thorold | Apr 5, 2008 |
Na een uur kwam ze beneden, Adriaan was er niet.
 
Marcat
ADBO | Hi ha 1 ressenya més | Nov 11, 2022 |

Premis

Estadístiques

Obres
4
Membres
13
Popularitat
#774,335
Valoració
½ 3.5
Ressenyes
3
ISBN
4