Writer Falun Ellie Koos: ‘In my family, Post was the harbinger of a problem’

In the past, Falun Ellie Koos always bought Staatsloten. One a month. Nothing won of course. Well, seven fifty maybe. But never more than the investment – while it was acid -earned money. And yet. It was necessary. Because with such a Staatslot you bought the idea of ​​an excerpt, from life as a postman, employee of a meat processing factory or cleaner of operating rooms.

Jobs that Falun Ellie Koos (who had the pronouns and them used) all had. “Everything they just hired for. If you have no more than a mavo diploma, you don’t have that much choice.” And learning was not an option. “There was a great fear of debts to me. And I could not study without making debts. Plus: I had to put in right away, at home. So I had to earn money. There was much suspicion with employers. Did you not get rid of the edges? How often do you go to the WC? Murw is made by work.

But: there were Staatsloten. “I knew that the chance was very small that I would win something. You might as well throw a coin in a well and then hope for a bag of money. They only sell you an illusion, the chance to dream. It was fantasizing, manufacturing something in your head to make the reality more bearable. I had no idea what I would do with that, if your view was not about. See how you can get out of that, you have to start thinking magically. “

In the end, Koos started to do an art training. “I did not live far from Utrecht and I knew that the HKU was there, and I knew that I always thought I was in writing in things. Writing things from me actually, creating clarity with words. First I did an audition for a writing course and I was rejected, but a year later I tried it again and I was hired. Then I didn’t get rid of it anymore.”

Longing for the unknown

The good news is: that magical thinking did make sense. Now they are a writer. It was that desire for the unknown that was at the beginning of the road that now led to the shortlist of the Libris Literature Prize. Koos’ debut novel Mourner Is one of the last six contenders, the winner will be announced next month.

I like to fantasize about the impossible, wrote Koos in the Essay ‘Lassenener’ with which they won the Joost Zwagerman Essay Prize in 2022. “An essay that is about a social issue and at the same time tells a personal story,” said that jury: it was Koos’ personal story about the consequences of growing up in poverty. It was about the distrust that Koos felt at himself at the art training, where the other students were open and curious. Those character traits described Koos as achievements that could not afford to them: “I had never learned to be curious. I was used to gather only the much needed information, that what is needed to save you. There is a door there, a window there. That is the escape route.”

Mourner Is a fictionalization of that theme: it is the story of young Ada, who has said goodbye to an art training to chop on a Spanish hill, and mourns her childhood, life in poverty that she and her brother became victims of. Although Ada does not see herself as a victim, and she will not call her memories. Hard is, as she learned from her father: not howling, but fighting. Armed, she must be, harnessed, to cope with life.

So when a youth worker says understanding about her failing brother that he “didn’t make himself either [heeft]”, Ada makes angry.” Because we have not all made ourselves, “she says. “If we start like this, nobody is liable for his own life course, then it doesn’t make a blow anymore. You have not made yourself, but you have to make it yourself. You really have to cut your place in the world yourself.”

That is “a thought that I know”, but not exactly what Koos would think. “I don’t really know if I think she’s right. On the one hand: if you only sit down about where you come from and the backlog you have given that, nothing happens. But on the other hand, your youth and training have a lot of influence on your frame of reference, on your perspective, and therefore what you can do. That is both going on.”

Mobile home

Koos himself also deducted from “the kind of person who can look no further than the hedge trimmer stabbed in the ground on the edge of the garden,” as Ada describes itself, growing in a mobile home. Koos: “With those boxing hedges around it, so you had very limited view. Literally hopeless.”

Maar: „Er zit meer in de roman dat verzonnen is dan echt gebeurd. De roman is losjes gebaseerd op de dynamieken in mijn gezin, maar heel erg gefictionaliseerd. Vanaf het moment dat ik met het idee voor de roman begon te spelen, voelde ik wel meteen dat er hier een urgentie achter zat, vanuit mijzelf: dit is mijn verhaal en perspectief, dat mensen uit de artistieke bubbel waarin ik nu zit niet kennen, en daarom wilde ik dat graag neerzetten. Maar de I don’t have anger that has been reflected on it – I can reflect on it, but a character is more interesting if she is still in the middle of it.

The firmer Ada became, the more interesting she became as a character, says Koos. “That also made her an unreliable narrator for me. We are in her super subjective experience of the world. But my book is also about what is being concealed, about what Ada does not see. It is therefore separate to hear that readers find it so funny how she crackles art education -” everyone is busy with what she is doing with what they are doing with what she is doing with what they are doing with what they are doing with what they are doing with what they are doing with what they are doing with what they are doing with what they are doing with what she she feel“Snarts Ada about her fellow students.” They do all the time research to what they experienced. ” Koos: “The point is of course that as soon as she starts to feel and experience, it becomes extremely painful for her. There is so much pulpit, unprocessed feeling, she can only get rid of that cynically. She has something to solve. But she does feel a talent for feeling. How she can observe a painting, or in Spain the slopes of the grass that also pays.”

Double

Where writing had started as a form for finding clarity, Koos learned on the training that texts were given beauty of ambiguity. “Because the world is ambiguous. But in a youth like mine, ambiguity was the last thing you wanted. If you are busy surviving, always estimating the situation – what is going on, how can I manage – do you want clarity. Ambiguity is suspected. I think to see beauty, you shouldn’t be too much with clarity.”

“As a child you find out at some point that your parents are not infallible. That they do not know everything that they can be hurt, that they can die. Until then you have been able to trust that your parents will solve things for you, that you did not have to think about it. At least: that is usually the case if it has been a bit safe. macht hadden over wat er op hen af ​​kwam, dat ze de dingen in de hand hadden. Post, bijvoorbeeld. In mijn gezin was post de voorbode van een probleem, altijd eng. Want: dan wilde iemand iets van ons. Meestal niet iets goeds. Ik kan me ook wel herinneren dat mijn moeder eindeloos aan de telefoon hing met een of andere instantie, over iets wat ze moest betalen. En dat ze steeds bozer werd, steeds emotioneler. In mijn gezin was er altijd die ondertoon van wantrouwen naar de buitenwereld, The fear that there is no place for you. You feel that as a child. ”

And yes, you will learn that you have to ‘cut’ your own place in the world, as Ada called it. In the beginning on the art training I was mainly doing exercises, you learn to play, say – that was very nice, and educational for me, because I may not have had much game, less than most. At the same time, the question is increasingly being suggested: what did you tell? Who did I learn that I went to that training, I went to that training. could tell me that there was room for that. pears did that. “

Lived -in theme

“I would only dare to take that space myself if I would feel the greatest possible urgency at what I made. It was with this story: this was a book that had to be done. And because I had lived through the theme, this was perhaps the best story I had to say. So I didn’t really escape it, that’s why I could be seen as a beast, so that he was, ovor,, hey, ovor, What is great, you have written about your childhood?

In short, it worked out well. But Ada is still an open wound, at the end of Mourner. What would Falun Ellie chose to recommend her? “I would tell her to go back to art education. Taking it seriously again. Not pretending it is all nonsense. The sensitivity she develops there is also for people like them.”

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