Men who no longer draw their lives, which are constricted by work, home and other half, are a type of character that often appears in the work of the Flemish writer Jeroen Theunissen, who was shortlisted for the Libris Literature Prize in 2017 with The detours. In his debut novel The Invisible (2003) he has bank clerk Herbert Danigs, the bourgeois incarnate, derail and murder his wife. It doesn’t get so dramatic in the case of Horacio Gnade, the teacher of Spanish-language literature from A form of fatigue (2008) who leaves hearth and home from one moment to the next and travels to faraway places. In your skin (2018), Theunissen’s latest novel, Griff abandons the wife who is pregnant with him and moves from Wales to Brussels, the international city where he seems delighted with his new life of successful lobbying and non-binding. one night stands. Until in a neighborhood cafe his eye is caught by a young immigrant from Ghana.
In I = cartographer it is Theunissen himself who struggles with his sedentary civilian life (although at the very end of the book he does throw some sand in the reader’s eyes with a rather jaded disclaimer that he and his character only partially overlap). It’s 2017 and the writer is plagued with crippling anxiety attacks. His marriage is on the brink of death, he has a job that he doesn’t like, the care for his two sons is too much for him and he has never felt any love for the part of the earth that should be his home (…) .’
He decides to take a long hike across Europe on his own. A journey that starts in the south-west of Ireland and which will take him via England, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria to Turkey. When he sees Asia on the other bank of the Bosphorus in Istanbul, more than six months after his departure, his journey is complete.
Existential crisis or not, in the bulky, multicolored I = cartographer (not a nice title by the way) Theunissen doesn’t do navel-gazing, although of course he had plenty of time for that along the way. He does, however, lard the story of his walking tour with passages about the period after his return, in which, remarkably enough, he focuses almost all attention on his sons and hardly mentions his (now ex-) wife. Theunissen questions his paternity and concludes that he is a father ‘who doesn’t really know how to live this life’. You hardly hear about his ‘partnership’. What kind of marriage did he have? Why did it go wrong?
It is only a detail, but the lack of these questions is noticeable in a story that is propelled in many places by questions and by attempts to come up with answers. I = cartographer is to a large extent a question book and that is because Theunissen wants to understand not only himself, but just about everything. Who am I? But also for example: what is Liverpool? What makes a German a German? What is Europe? What is the history of Europe? What is history anyway? What is our modern reality? And what does the term ‘reality’ actually mean?
This all sounds rather theoretical but that’s about the last thing I = cartographer is. Theunissen asks big questions, yes, but his answers do not get lost in abstractions, they excel in concreteness. His book is a magnificent collection of stories, treatises, anecdotes and points of interest for which the author has drawn with the boundless curiosity of a homo universalis from a range of disciplines and art forms (history, philosophy, literature, film, biology, geology, architecture, archeology and still something like that). With accurate intuition he has forged all this into a quirky, compelling whole.
Theunissen hardly follows beaten paths. When he talks about Liverpool, it’s not about the Beatles but about the major role this port city played in the slave trade and about Billy Fury, a long-forgotten pop star of the 1960s. When the writer is in Poland, he does not go to the big cities but to a remote corner in the south-east of the country, where he philosophizes in the small town of Dukla based on a novel by Andrzej Stasiuk of the same name. In Austria, Hitler is an almost inevitable subject, but here too Theunissen focuses on the small and the unobvious: the ‘unique soul connection’ of the young Hitler with his mother, who died in 1907 in front of her son. Then Theunissen writes: ‘I catch myself that this image of that gentle, sweet mother and the somewhat unworldly but well-meaning son makes me soften a bit.’
‘A hundred thousand stories contain the dark’, writes Theunissen somewhere. It seems as if he wants to tell as many as possible. In the meantime, he also takes a good look around, which results in penetrating pages, especially in the chapters on the countries in Eastern Europe. About the traces left by countless invasions, conquests, occupations, genocides and deportations: constantly shifting borders, ruins of cities and villages that have been fled or evacuated. Isolated language communities of laggards or of non-integrated newcomers.
Theunissen is in his forties but every now and then reveals himself as a grumpy old man: he grumbles on social media, believes we work too much, dislikes the massive use of GPS and dismisses translation apps as impoverishing our communication. But he can also have fun. Unforgettable is the passage in which he describes how he and a young woman in a cafe on the border of Ukraine and Romania suddenly start laughing together: ‘We giggled and tapped each other, and finally fell on the table laughing, we held beware when one of the guests came from outside to see what the hell was going on (…).’
It is impossible to do justice to all the subjects that Theunissen broaches and to all the stories he tells in this short report. Well would you I = cartographer can briefly summarize in the beautiful words with which Jorge Luis Borges his collection The creator (1960) concludes: ‘It is a man’s goal to map the world. (…) Shortly before he dies, he discovers that in that patient labyrinth of lines the image of his own face is visible.’ Perhaps thanks to Borges, the title of Theunissen’s book is not so bad after all.
Jeroen Theunissen: I = cartographer† The Busy Bee; 428 pages; € 24.99.
