There’s a game certain Dutch authors with an ironical sense of fun like to play. This is to angle before the critics a barbed work studded with their favourite bait and then laugh at them when they are hooked. This Nanne Tepper accomplished in 1995 by writing a totally allusive book that set every literary journalist in the Netherlands gibbering after his sources. In addition, he confected a fashionably decadent end of century mood by making brother/sister incest his main theme. The novel was a runaway success and the critics were all the more intrigued and charmed when its author, a thirty-three year old rock singer, denounced them as ‘just fooling around’.


In fact, Tepper seems keen on settling the hash of his fellow writers as well. The novel opens with his hero Victor newly arrived in Paris — ‘All he had was his past, the Dutch writer’s treasure trove’. At one swipe, this disposes of about half the first novels by sensitive young authors in the past few decades. But where those were subject to the everyday problems of emergent sexuality, Tepper gives us frigid siblings at ease with no one but each other and their nymphomaniac younger sister. ’Is this likely to remind us of such roaring boys of a previous generation as Jan Wolkers? Well, he’s seen off too, with the ultimate heresy. A novel by Wolkers’s master Jack Kerouac is dismissed as ‘a book that had started off promising but had slid further and further into sentimental whining’, and with it the totality of Wolkers’ work! Tepper is the more justified in savaging his adulators for overlooking the put-down he accords even his own work: ‘Victor had once stated that the television generation (Excusez l’expression!) was the most susceptible to sentimentality in the history of mankind. They thought and recalled in dramatic rushes. At the time, Hille had added that this generation unconsciously accumulated pet mythologies, which then, using the emotive eye trained to such heights by television, they held up to their own primal accounts (the wish often being father to the comparison), thereby compiling an ever-expanding antology of ‘stories of my life’ to flip through like a collector’ (p.137).


The father of this sardonic and intricate style is Nabokov at his most fey. Tepper makes it abundantly clear that Nabokov’s late novel Ada is his main inspiration. He is, however, writing predominantly for his countrymen. Foreign readers will be hampered by far more than the thinly connected ‘dramatic rushes’ of the narration. Much of the literary tilting will pass them by, as will the pathos of the book’s setting, the marginalised peat lands of the north-east Netherlands. Another of the novel’s charms, its mixture of dialect side by side with phrases from German and the latest American teenage slang, can only be partly suggested. Besides dialogue in dialect, the novel’s fourth and final section is a dialect monologue. Put in the mouth of a recently buried friend of the family, it seems to speak the elegy of normality and settled values, not just in the Netherlands but throughout Europe.

‘It was a long trail’ve folk, I ‘member now, an’ the church bells ringin’ hard enough to shudder all the walls of Oude Huizen. Real pretty, that long trail steppin’ through the village, an’ when they crossed the Hoofdweg old Bu joined ‘em, with people mumblin’ it was a scandal, the old Nazi — it was wartime when I said to him: ‘None of my concern, Bu, but don’t you reckon you got it all wrong, with them Germans? I mean, can’t you see, no matter how long it takes, folks like that’ll take a dive, any fool can see that’ but he was a policeman by then an’ that was after his fashion, an’ he turned a blind eye by occasion, but discussin’ matters wasn’t his way, still he never left, an’ now was bringin’ up the rear, that’s beautiful, but kind’ve sad too.’ [p.219, tr. Sam Garrett]