A cupboard of a house with a cupboard in front appears to be no exception in Baarn. Sometimes the book protection is made of wood from the forests in the neighborhood, sometimes the content is thematic (with a ladle as a door button to accentuate that) and sometimes the whole of a broad reading reading life, from the end of the fifty tinten trilogy of El James to the absolute start of the career of the career of career): Archibald Strohalm.
There are those books that you can tell a few things about, but that you have never read. Over Archibald Strohalm For example, I know that the young Mulisch sent his novel to the already legendary publisher Geert van Oorschot in 1951. He was delighted about the beginning, he said Mulisch, and then silent for months. Mulisch did, he thought his book “good and bad at the same time”, although he didn’t want to wait too long because of “the program, that I have imposed myself for my life.” So he refused to rid his manuscript of the “annoying kitsch” who had discovered and appeared Van Oorschot in it Archibald Strohalm At De Bezige Bij, according to Van Oorschot with a cart freight to improvements suggested by Hém – a story for which no further evidence has been found.
The Baarnse straw – A sixth edition from 1970 as a ‘darboek’ – can indeed be read as a book that is good and bad at the same time, but above all it is a very wonderful story. The title hero is a young man with an office relationship who develops a deep hatred for the weekly puppet show on the square in front of his door. He disrupts the puppet show and declares loudly to come up with something better. So he says his job to devote himself to the writership, well, changing the world from behind his writing table.
Now you often come across a self -proclaimed genius in the universe of Mulisch, but the continuous doubt of Archibald Strohalm (he also drews the capital letters of his name) leads to a particularly intriguing result. For example, when he gets a telegram from his sister, he suggests that the time changes direction: “The orderer takes the telegram again, he cycles back to the post office […] His sister writes the words backwards of the paper. “
Here a young author gives himself completely free job, including weird encounters in the cafe, a dog saved from the canal called Moses and follows the hero everywhere and a dentist who feels straw tooth (I have the idea that this is no coincidence) about his reasons to write and who jokingly calls him a genius. Strohalm cannot see the Scherts of that, after which the dentist concludes: “You say that you are a genius.” Strohalm: “If I ask you if you are a dental technicer, you won’t lie about it?”
Add the series of jokes on pages 129 and 130 and you give you won. Those jokes end up with the question of whether he believes in a previous meal. Somewhere else, Mulisch philosophizes about the miracle of hatching an egg – there are many eggs from the sky in the novel: “It is a, outside the mind, sublimation of great incomprehensibility and beauty.” Maybe that’s what Archibald Strohalm Ultimately, an expression of the wonderful process in which an egg becomes a rooster.