My father loves biographies. A few years ago I gave him a novel for his birthday – good for a change, I thought. It became A small life from Hanya Yanagihara, which was a hype at the time. I hadn’t read it myself. Now I think that a crime, giving someone a book that you have not approved yourself, then I just did that.
My father thanked me, for years I heard nothing – the biographies preceded – until he just started about it on a Sunday afternoon. “Do you know what is a terrible book?” he said. “A small life. My heaven, what a torture. ” I said nothing.
The following years he returned to the book several times – he had clearly forgot that I had given him. His wording became fiercer: the last time he started about it he called it A small life “The worst book also”.
I learned from the incident in silence. Last month I gave him for Father’s Day Wingman Gift, the biography of Godfried Bomans. That struck because he had just finished I’ve never liedthe biography of Hugo Brandt Corstius. “A great book,” according to him.
“The biography is more popular than ever,” said literary scientist Lotte Jensen last Monday in the radio program Speech makers. Whether such a thing about Godfried Bomans, Angela Merkel or Arne Slot is going: selling it. I don’t understand it completely. When I Wingman Just before purchasing in the store, I soon came across the next passage: “Joseph, who would become the great -grandfather of Godfried Bomans, ended up with his sister in the Deezengesticht in Frederiksoord in Drenthe, part of the Society of Weldadiness, where he stayed until he was twenty.”
From such a sentence I have had to lie in bed for half an hour. Where do other people get the patience and interest from? How do you find the courage to read 400 pages further after something like that?
When I ask my father, I don’t get a clear answer. “Well,” he sighs, “such a lifetime …”. Blissful look. I recognized the same look at Jensen during her radio interview (nowadays you also get a picture of that). Jensen is working on the biography of poet Hendrik Tollens, both her “Guilty Pleasure” If “one of the most boring people ever” – as if the biography of an interesting someone is not difficult enough.
According to Jensen, something can also be made from a boring someone. “Sometimes was [Tollens] Just very much and unkind, I didn’t expect that from this charitable citizen-poet. ” In fact, it was “a huge gossiper. And he was very quickly offended if someone did not write back soon enough.” Someone here falls horribly through the basket. And as far as bomans are concerned: although it wrote endearing fairy tales about beetles and butterflies, but as soon as he was ready, it went hard.
And so it is always with biographies: if someone has a rough image, the biographer zooms in on the mitigating circumstances. If someone is known as good, then suddenly all kinds of shadow sides must be brought out. After forty -five chapters you will find out that someone was a bit good, but also a bit bad. A bit shy, but also a bit of a cheater.
“It’s nice if someone also has a dark side,” said Jensen. Someone with no dark side, or just nasty traits: that would only be innovative.
Admittedly: the soon’s biography of actress Gwyneth Paltrow (that of the Vaginakaars), in which she tells her that she found herself too smart for ex Brad Pitt, I would like to read. If I have finished it, my father can borrow it.
Tessa Sparreboom is Neerlandicus and former editor of Propria Cures.