Margriet de Moor made her debut with a successful collection of short stories in 1988, followed by the prize-winning Double Portrait (Dubbelportret, 1989), a collection of three novellas, and then this, her first novel, First Grey, Then White, Then Blue in 1991. This too won a prize but was equally episodic and in fact De Moor seems to have set her face against linear narrative — and with brilliant results. In this case the story is told from the subjective viewpoint of the four people most involved, each of whom has a section to him or herself. They include two childhood friends, Erik and Robert, and their respective wives, Nellie and Magda.


The story turns on Magda’s sudden disappearance for a period of two years, after which she returns, giving no explanation and acting as if nothing has happened. The book begins with Erik on the day he discovered Robert slumped by the body of Magda, whom he had stabbed the previous night. Robert’s narrative juggles the main episodes of his adult life. Promiscuous and disengaged, he meets Magda in Quebec and masterfully carries her off. At this period he is an artist and the two spend their honeymoon period in a converted mountain farm in France. His loss of artistic vision coincides with the transition from sexual romance to marital role playing. Returning to the Netherlands, he becomes a successful industrialist and withdraws into himself. Magda, whose narrative follows, is equally aware of the crisis in the marriage but her strategy is to withdraw into her past. During her two years of absence she revisited the area in the Cévennes where she had first lived with Robert. From there she eventually goes on to the Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula to which her mother had emigrated after the war and then to the Moravian village where she was born. Her return back home is a return to herself, but renewed.


The technique in all these narratives is to jump from the present to the past, which is usually told from the perspective of its time but then reviewed in the light of the teller’s later experience. What we have is not a connected telling but an exploration of contrasting psychologies. Where they are at one is in their basically incommunicable subjectivity. No personality can be possessed, each one is enigmatic to others and often to him or herself as well. This lesson is brought home by Nellie’s thoughts on the day of Magda’s funeral at the end of the book. The least complicated of all the characters, she is the mother of an intelligent but mentally defective son who relates more to astronomy than people. Her thoughts centre on him rather than on Magda. The conclusion towards which the book appears to be leading is that each of us lives in a state of alienation which is barely hidden by social convention. To break down the conventions brings us face to face with ourselves: in Magda’s case a liberating experience but one that plunges Robert into a violent and self-destructive rejection.

Voices, smells, the proof of love which would find its way to a place next to a vase of flowers in a frame. There must have been a sympathetic and at the same time cheerful expression on my face. That was all right by me. I may have awakened from my favourite dream, these small fragments of alien life certainly played upon my passions just as effectively. Not being the mistress of the house any more, not being a faithful wife, not being an old friend, fine, you can certainly be more relaxed. Meanwhile we’d reached a town. I remember looking at the rainy sky breaking open above the houses and thinking: well now, it’s a long time since you felt so sensible and noble!

Now I had gone on a journey myself, I understood the tourists peering through their lenses on the Astridboulevard. What you are looking for is a flat, untouched world. Set the timer, set the distance, and the background remains background. I felt the arm of my travelling companion on mine. Around us hung a smell of soft green soap. Why should I know who she was, outside this moment? Like savages and the dead, travellers pay no attention to past or future, we couldn’t care less about the lessons of history, laugh with me, eat with me, that will link you to those things too! We’ll see each other again, won’t we? Yes, yes, of course, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, never¼ (p. 119-20, tr. Paul Vincent)