{"id":294706,"date":"2013-07-25T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-25T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2013\/07\/25\/amsterdam-stories\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:56:35","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:56:35","slug":"amsterdam-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2013\/07\/25\/amsterdam-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"Amsterdam Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nescio, Koekebakker, J.H.F. Gr\u00f6nloh. Writing only in his spare time, he was known to most of the world as a respectable and prominent businessman, the director of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company: exactly the kind of man whom his early protagonists would scorn, and at whom his later protagonists would smile grimly, knowing that \u201crespectability\u201d is society\u2019s code-word for \u201chalf-stifled misery.\u201d Producing only a few short stories, he went largely unnoticed during his lifetime, only posthumously gaining a place in the canon of Dutch literature. Now, his poignant and subtly humorous Amsterdam Stories<\/em> have finally been brought to an English-speaking audience by Damion Searls, an award-winning translator who works with German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch texts.<\/p>\n

The nine stories and novellas of this collection, arranged in chronological order of their writing, come together to form a composite portrait of a single life \u2014 quite transparently a version of Nescio\u2019s own. In his early stories, such as \u201cThe Freeloader\u201d and \u201cYoung Titans,\u201d the narrator is Koekebakker, who is idealistic, poor, and (mostly) happy, confident as he is \u201cgoing to do something_\u201d with his life. A vague, beautiful something that animates him and his group of four like-minded friends. The narrator looks back on this youth with jaded wistfulness: \u201cWe were kids \u2014 but good kids . . . We\u2019re much smarter now, so smart it\u2019s pathetic.\u201d But in spite of this cynicism, it is surprisingly easy to get caught up in the half-baked ideas and humorous antics of Koekebakker & Co. They are a bit ridiculous, especially seen from the narrator\u2019s half-bitter, half-indulgent viewpoint, but they are sincere, delightful, and recognizably _real<\/em>. The exception of course is Japi, the exasperating but fascinating \u201cfreeloader\u201d of the collection\u2019s first story, who is more allegory than man. He observes, he sits, he walks. He borrows money, smokes other people\u2019s cigars, and takes his friend\u2019s cloak when they are walking in the rain. And, when the world catches up with him and tries to pin him down into a job, he quietly and almost cheerfully steps off a bridge. A simple (even silly) story, but Nescio pulls it off with grace and warmth.<\/p>\n

By \u201cLittle Poet,\u201d written when Nescio was thirty-five, the narrator begins to lose his wistful nature and takes a more openly mocking stance toward his protagonist, and possibly against poetry in general. He leaves Koekebakker and his group behind, moving on to a nameless, doomed young poet, whom he pokes fun at mercilessly. One of the conduits of this fun-poking is the God of the Netherlands, who can\u2019t seem to understand why he bothers to keep creating poets, particularly the meek, boyish breed like the Little Poet in question:<\/p>\n

\n

Twice the God of the Netherlands shook his venerable head and twice his long venerable muttonchops slid back and forth across his vest.
\nbq. It didn\u2019t add up. There must be a mistake somewhere. A poet with no hair, that was very strange. The God of the Netherlands hadn\u2019t cared much for poets for thirty years. You could no longer tell what to make of them. Respectable or disrespectable? Impossible to say . . .<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

God sighed. He\u2019d have to talk it over with a real poet tomorrow. Maybe Potgieter . . .<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Look, there goes the little poet. A handsome young man, you have to admit: thin, with a nicely shaved boyish face except for a pair of flying buttresses in front of his years, and so suntanned. He greets someone, tilting his straw hat a fraction about his close-cut hair.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Bizarre\u2014so little hair\u2014but it definitely was a little poet because God couldn\u2019t figure him out, or Potgieter either. And Professor Volmer wanted nothing to do with him.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At one point, the Little Poet is walking down the street when he sees a group of women sitting outside a cafe and prays silently, \u201cOh God . . . what if you performed a miracle now, what if all their clothes suddenly fell off?\u201d The narrator hedges this oh-so-scandalous thought playfully, writing in an aside: \u201cYou and I, dear reader, never think such things. And my dear lady readers . . . Mercy me, perish the thought.\u201d
\nIn his later stories, his writing begins to take on a different character. By \u201cInsula Dei,\u201d written twenty-five years and two World Wars later, his tone is bitter, though not unsentimental: Nescio has become an old man who cannot understand how his life \u2014 the shining promise he saw in his youth \u2014 has blinked past him. His nostalgia is more morbid now, colored as it is by war, hunger, and age. Reminiscing with the narrator about their youth, his friend Flip laments: \u201cBack then we died of consumption, not tuberculosis.\u201d Nescio\u2019s skill lies in his ability to make even this macabre thought a thing of beauty.<\/p>\n

As the title suggests, this is, in a sense, also a \u201ccity book\u201d after the fashion of Mark Helprin\u2019s Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em> (New York) and Andrei Bely\u2019s Petersburg<\/em> (St. Petersburg). These authors live and breathe their cities, and these works draw their readers onto the streets, into their cafes and parks and back alleys. Nescio accomplishes this with beautiful subtleness; Amsterdam is never the focus of his tales, but remains an unobtrusive but constant and compelling presence.<\/p>\n

All in all, Nescio\u2019s stories \u2014 often tragic but always beautiful \u2014 linger in the mind. They do not seem to have been composed; rather, they unfold with the grace of inevitability. Their melancholy weight means that they are best consumed slowly, leaving time between the stories to allow them to settle and be absorbed. At only 155 pages, this slim volume has a quiet power to match that of the most sweeping of Great Novels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nescio, Koekebakker, J.H.F. Gr\u00f6nloh. Writing only in his spare time, he was known to most of the world as a respectable and prominent businessman, the director of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company: exactly the kind of man whom his early protagonists would scorn, and at whom his later protagonists would smile grimly, knowing that \u201crespectability\u201d is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[52436,1356,5256,52456,52446,1796,2056],"class_list":["post-294706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-amsterdam-stories","tag-damion-searls","tag-dutch-literature","tag-hannah-chute","tag-nescio","tag-new-york-review-books","tag-nyrb"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294706"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":339396,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294706\/revisions\/339396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}