Wolkers’ initial training was in the arts and during the 1950s he studied sculpture under Zadkine in Paris. It is not surprising, therefore, that the unnamed narrator of this best-selling novel should be an avant-garde sculptor. This adds authenticity to the story but it is by no means autobiographical. Much of Wolkers work is marked by the sensuality made possible by the sexual revolution of the 1960s, but also by an obsession with death. The story here concerns the artist’s meeting with his future wife Olga while he is a student, the eventual breakdown of the marriage at the urging of Olga’s appalling middle class mother and his slowly coming to terms with that loss. After a love affair and two more failed marriages, Olga is operated on for a brain tumour and dies with her faithful former husband at her side. The sexual element in the writing, much touted in the publicity of the time, is not the work’s main raison-d’être but takes its natural place in the story; it does not extend beyond the book’s first half in any case.


Wolkers began writing in the 1960s (Turkish Delight appeared in 1969 but is set a decade earlier) at a time when Jack Kerouac was revered. His stylistic influence is everywhere in this book, which might be compared in some respects to Kerouac’s The Subterraneans. There is the same breathless feel of spontaneous prose, each chapter consisting of a single unbroken paragraph; the same thirst to set every memory down as significant; even the same background of jazz, particularly bebop. Wolkers, however, uses the style to define the narrator’s character in a subtler way. His orgy of nostalgia for a lost love also embraces the films they saw, music they listened to, dead pets and altered landscapes. Olga suggests that his urge to hold on to his vision of her as she was when they first met is one of the reasons for her deserting him in the first place; it was too stifling. Wolkers also goes beyond Kerouac in the outrageousness of his fancy, which extends to such chapter headings as ‘Chicory and Whiskers’, ‘Marxist Garden Gnomes’ and ‘Caesar and Brigitte Bardot’. He conjures up a key decade in all its variety and tells his story movingly and with skill.

The Buitenveldertse Wandelweg went through the lower marshland and by the clearwater ditches where even in the heart of summer the imagination saw dark, bent figures leaving the city on skates and swarming out over the polders. The twists in the path which was grown over with willow shoots where the benches stood and where she had so often kicked off her shoes and stretched out in the sun with her head in my lap, listening to the murmurs of sound from the summer cottages coming through the bushes. That’s if there wasn’t a little man sitting there, waiting to show his cock to any solitary nurse who might cycle by. And then the dike, where there were nearly always more peeping toms than necking couples so that the area had the appearance of a camera crew recording a love scene. The bend in the river seen from above, looking down on the cargo-boats sideslipping by, their decks full of red crates or orange oil barrels. The herons, the same colour as the water below, sailing over the ripples and the rowers’ voices that travelled up as if they were very close. The trees of Amstelhaven in the distance with colonies of crows rising into the air as if the treetops had suddenly expanded. There, by the elbow of the river she once ate all seven ice-lollies I had bought for her from the icecream man by the rusty bicycle shed next to the Miranda Pool. It gave her cramps of course and she went home doubled up with her hands pressed to her stomach. Years later when everything between her and me was long gone and hopelessly lost she still remembered these everyday things when she suddenly dropped in to say hello. I made her come with me for a walk by the dike that night. I hadn’t been there myself for years either. The earthworks all around were now almost at a level with the dike. The high privets had gone and deep bulldozer tracks ran through the ground. There was a fire of old suitcases and torn chesterfields and all the other things that eventually end up on waste land. She stood so close that her skin tightened with the heat and said: ‘Fire is the most beautiful of all.’ (p. 77-8, tr. Greta Kilburn)

Reviewers:

BP Barry Price

DS Dennis Strik

JF Jane Fenoulhet

KRB Katheryn Ronnau Bradbeer

PV Paul Vincent

RS Reinier Salverda

TH Theo Hermans

YL Yann Lovelock

Notes

As this is a book for English-speaking readers we have tried to keep to the convention of alphabetically listing foreign names following English language rules hence we list Anke de Vries under ‘V’ rather than ‘D’. People more familiar with the original form will forgive us!