How does the village react to the dead dance marieke?

The float for Prince Carnival is ready. His throne is surrounded by giant paper mache heads. Greedily red are the tongues in their gaping mouths, their teeth pointed and stark white. Night after night, a barn has been devoted to working on the chariot, but now the parade is cancelled. The carnival has been canceled due to the death of a dansmarieke, a majorette. Oh, how still she lay there, by the side of the road.

In Not from here, the second novel by Judith Maassen (1963), tells a roofer how ‘we’ in the village react to the discovery of the dead girl. He has a good view of it from the roofs on which he works, moreover he sometimes hears something through an open window that is not intended for other people’s ears. The good man is not very astute in the meantime, although he does notice a few things after the arrival of a new family in the village. It’s a family from the city, who wear jeans on Sundays and don’t have a cellar full of preserving bottles with pickled fruit like ‘we’. In fact, their newly built house doesn’t even have a basement. A high hedge, behind which anything could happen.

It is a cool portrait that Maassen sketches of this guy. In his spare time he reads the Winkler Prins Encyclopedia (in which he discovers that the literal meaning of ‘carne vale‘ is: the disappearance of the flesh). His wife is so normal it’s almost creepy, her apron unwrinkled, her hands always busy. ‘Every marriage has a winner and a loser’, the roofer echoes his late father. And that’s it: the reader can come up with anything.

More than a thriller Not from here a portrait of a village community. The story revolves less around the clarification of the dansmarieke’s death than you might think. However, things are on edge.

Also read a double interview with Judith Maassen and her brother Theo: ‘My sister and I are staying together more and more’

In addition to the roofer, there are two narrators. Both come from outside. One has been there for years, but still doesn’t really belong, it turns out. The story of Heleen, who trades in donkey milk, with which the novel closes, is less well developed than the story of the roofer. Strong is the middle part, about thirteen-year-old Rifka, daughter of the new family. Can she, may she take the empty place in the middle of the dance mariekes? What should she do with the fact that the boyfriend of the dead girl is trying to get closer, especially to her? Is an equally amiable farmer’s son a better option?

Not from here is an entertaining, atmospheric novel, which makes you forgive the writer a few things. Rifka internalizes the dead dance marieke, she hears her comment on what she is doing, for example (an attempt at) masturbating. This artifice retains something thoughtful, although the counter voice is sometimes witty. Rifka feels, on top of Prince Carnival’s float, for the first time in boy’s pants. Gosh, a dick, she thinks. ‘Picks are for fathers’, the dansmarieke then reports. ‘This is a cock. […] This is because of you. Do you feel how powerful you are?’ After which Rifka unfortunately finds out how impotent she is.

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