December in Tilburg. It seems as if the sun has taken a day off, or perhaps has already started its Christmas recess. In search of a book that can carry a person through the dark days, I end up at the Maranatha Church, which takes care of the soul of the local students. Churches are popular locations for street libraries, but the Tilburg church cabinet is special in the sense that it is decorated thematically. No old Book Week gifts here, tips to become filthy rich or psychopaths running wildly around, but pious titles like How a Pope was right, The Victory of Reason and Letters about suffering.
I have some doubts about the two volumes of the collected works of Saint Teresa, but they are hers Meditations not. Then I succumbed to it The Karamazov brothers from 1880, in Arthur Langeveld’s acclaimed translation twenty years ago. Fyodor Dostoyevsky also knew that it was a big book, as evidenced by the cautious way in which the narrator goes out of his way in a ‘foreword’ to apologize for having written two parts, although “one novel for such a modest and indeterminate hero may be too much.”
We don’t mind that: publisher Van Oorschot managed to put the 966 pages in a binding and from it the intended hero, Alyosha, the youngest of the Karamazov brothers, rises like a bright light. A hero where your admiration for his goodness is equal to fear for his future.
In the meantime, the writer has fun portraying the hero’s father: the slacker Fyodor Karamazov, an airhead but not stupid, a man who always puts himself first. Read along: “In addition to elongated and fleshy bags under his small eyes, which always looked brutal, suspicious and mocking, besides a lot of deep wrinkles in his small but fat face, he also had a large Adam’s apple hanging under his pointed chin, fleshy and elongated like a purse, which gave it a disgustingly voluptuous appearance.” And to top it off: “Every time he started talking, his saliva would splash around.”
No, that’s not a good father to his three sons from two marriages (both wives died). This man could simply ‘forget’ his children, distracted by the full life or what he perceived as it. In the meantime, his penchant for sentiment and (self)destruction had spread to at least some of his offspring, what makes that The Karamazov brothers Although it is a long session due to its size, you never sit still because of all the entertaining developments.
But anyone who is interested in Christmas seriousness can also contact Karamazov. Take the passage in which the tormented and unfathomable brother Ivan Karamazov imagines Jesus appearing in sixteenth-century Seville. He brings a seven-year-old girl back from the dead and is then promptly thrown into prison by the Grand Inquisitor on duty: “Don’t answer, keep quiet. What else could you say? I know all too well what you’re going to say. You have no right to add anything to what you have said before. Why are you getting in our way? For you have come to get in our way, you know that very well.” Let this be the Christmas spirit. Dostoyevki’s Jesus is just like literature: something that keeps getting in our way in a world of armored certainties.