There are quite a few administrators who hide their street libraries indoors on New Year’s Eve from fireworks and vandalism, but in Stompetoren the books are still firmly stored behind their doors. (Indeed, the church of Stompetoren, fifteen minutes by bike to the east of Alkmaar, has a tower without a spire.)
The cupboard is well stocked: Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, the legendary Françoise Sagan, three Bibi Dumon Takken. And Casinothe novel with which Marja Brouwers inspired Dutch criticism (or at least part of it) into awe twenty years ago. That is not difficult to understand, based on the opening sentence alone: ”Until the day he met Philip van Heemskerk, nothing had ever happened in Rink de Vilder’s life in which his personal qualities could be shown off with impunity.” Very good, that ‘unpunished’.
As a child Rink was a brat, as a student he did little and thanks to an uncle he got a job as a film critic. As a reviewer, you can assume that a writer doesn’t mean anything nice by that. Rink took his work to the Cannes Film Festival in 1992, where his most distinctive experience consisted of a lengthy lovemaking session with a young German, during which he was greatly annoyed by the fact that she stuck out her buttocks at the wrong moments.
The next day, a collision speeds up Rink’s life. In Monte Carlo he crashes into the back of a Jaguar, which turns out to be owned by the Philip van Heemskerk from the first sentence. It turns out to be a charismatic proletarian cum solo sailor cum living room philosopher who ultimately gets a little deeper into the shady business than is pleasant. Rink falls for Moura, Van Heemskerk’s girlfriend. Van Heemskerk tolerates the relationship, although he regularly makes it clear that he still considers Moura his property. Rink is the appendage, the parasite if you like – like a reviewer parasitizing the work of art he is writing about.
In the meantime, Brouwers’ interest is not so much in the flat glamor of the Mediterranean (although that storyline is steadily increasing in tension), but in what thoughts about the world she can incorporate into her narrative. It leads to polemical highlights. They leave no stone unturned in the cultural revolution of the sixties and seventies, as if Brouwers personally wanted to chase the hippies from the Spui (“all those young people dancing rebelliously around an Amsterdam statue”) twenty-five years later. With nice mean sentences: “They didn’t think. They had thoughtlessly assumed that their youth was a quality, rather than a passing lack of merit.”
She takes the same pleasure out of her colleagues. All ‘quasi-Prousts’ who surrendered to a search through their inner self instead of trying to understand the world. “The result was a lot of chatter.” And: “Inevitably, the Prousts often opened a door and closed it behind them.”
In the meantime, Brouwers shows how you can extract something imaginable from the most homely. Take a leak that Rink doesn’t know what to do with, which leads to the question of which great figure in the history of philosophy is the better plumber: Kant or Hume. Those are the better questions. Answer on page 204.