Even after the week in which Rosm Alen is the grass tennis capital of the Netherlands, there are fixed values, such as The man in the black book (and cupboard). More than a cupboard, because there is a poem by Marino van Liempt on the side, who also turns out to be the manager (and author of, among others Male).
The Zwartkast attracts the better books: Zweig in German, Conrad in English, Claus in Dutch. And The Dutch Virgin Van Marente de Moor, the novel whose crowning with the AKO literature prize in 2011 was a surprise, but where you quickly wonder during lecture why other possible winners were once put forward. Janna, a young screen star who was apprenticed in 1936 is the estate of Egon von Bötticher, an old friend of her father, near Aachen.
You can propose a political context all kinds of historically and it is all in it, but in the first instance you already have enough of the sentences of the Moor, which make an adventure of even the smallest observation. Take the meeting with a group of cattle: “If you got closer, they worked up and you heard the lumps and bubbling in those big bodies, there the machinery worked at full speed. They did not let themselves be pet, but wrapped their limber tongues around your feet and drooled grass over it.”
Janna has a somewhat bucky eloquence, which you often encounter with the characters of the Moor. “The mother must have been beautiful once. Now she was no longer sure of her business. Yet she still made her eyelashes vibrate when she took a sip of wine, she held her head like a porcelain gem on her thin -stretched neck.” That mother is the mother of an identical twin – beautiful, hooded boys – who was also brought to the estate to get screen lessons. Threat: the military service that young Germans hung over in 1936.
More than by those two beautiful peers, Janna is immediately fascinated by her teacher. The face of von Bötticher is dominated by large scars: the result of war and sport. He is such a man who is mainly concerned with who seems to suggest deep grounds. He shields Janna against her reflection (no pleasure: “I was not my taste,” she says) and uses his house rabbit to gnaw a letter from Janna’s father.
A lot has happened between the two old friends. Janna’s father is the doctor who treated Von Bötticher’s injuries, about which the latter has his thoughts about. Because should damage be avoided? “Pain? Your father doesn’t want to know anything about that.” The contrast between the doctor and the Schermer also depicts that between the ‘coward’ Netherlands that did not flee in the First World War and Germany. Can you participate in life if you stay neutral if you are not willing to be damaged?
This way De Moor takes you with a certain hand from the small to the big one. Somewhere in the forest, von Bötticher kicks a mushroom. “The tenderness with which he tried to put the broken hat back on the stem brought me from my apropos.” Later he explains his act: “This mushroom has suffered damage, but at least now his spurs are spread.” In this novel everything can take place on a forest path.