Although the concept of this section is clear (reader gets a book from Kastje, it reads it and passes it through), I had the strong challenge The man in the middle to keep it yourself. The work of (in this edition from 1982 still J.) Bernlef is very dear to me for personal reasons. Moreover, I was used by the calm way in which the main character tries to catch the spirit of his grandfather on the basis of the matter that it has left behind.
I found the book in Houten, where the stairs of the platform, strangely enough, leads directly into the bicycle cellar, where there is still a large bookcase in front of the check -out gates that all rust some rust here and there: the freight train under the street libraries. With this thin Bernlef, a reprint from 1982 that consists of two parts. In ‘Broken White’ the storyteller is talking about his grandfather, in ‘a boy of forty’ about his father. The second part is very worthwhile, but I will talk about the unforgettable first part.
“With a lift he collapses the oblivion,” the narrator starts the story about his grandfather. “I hear the thing in the silence of the auditorium buzzing. He had been busy with cranes, bridges and lifts all his life. So very consistently actually. ” At work he was called the ‘machining doctor’. After the ceremony, the grandson does not join the mourners in the coffee room, but goes to the deserted house.
Grinding between his grandfather’s things, he recalls memories. Order weighed heavily; Here things had a permanent place. Life was laid down in hard facts, such as the dimensions of a room. The deceased left a large number of lists, such as those of all salary increases received 1901-1946. He did not give soft things: “He didn’t like plums, cherries, velvet fabrics. He was not interested in clothes, but I did see him turning a screw in wood with infinite care. ”
When a friend or knowledge died, he grabbed a pen and ruler to stire the relevant name on the birthday calendar. He did that with his wife’s, when she died.
In books he liked to underline, he wrote comments with pencil. Especially in the six -part The socialists, people and systems from mr. HPG Quack, which he removed from his bookcase with glass doors and gave his grandson with the words: “It says everything here.” It stays in the middle whether he referred to the text of Quack or whether he meant that his contributions in the margin told everything about his inner life.
He had been a communist his entire existence until the crushing of the Hungarian rebellion broke him off from those anchors. 1956 was also the year of death of his wife. Then he started drinking and disappeared into a fog that seems to point to Chimmerthe novel that Bernlef wrote a few years later.
The last list of the grandfather is one of the distances between his chair by the window and other locations in his home: three steps to the table, ten to ‘dresser (tea)’, twenty -five to the toilet. Then Bernlef writes: “The key to the meaning of this list is perhaps that the distance from his chair to the outside door is missing.”
You want to keep such a book with you. Fortunately I discovered in the second row of the bookcase that I already owned it. An heirloom.