Fiction that doesn’t necessarily draw from own experiences – it happens so rarely that it’s almost surprising. Fortunately, Daniël Rovers (1975) did not see a bone in it, as it turns out Forgotten masters, his fourth and if I’m not mistaken most ambitious novel. In it he describes one day in the lives of three women and two men, all associated with the Dumas, or the Rijksmuseum Dutch Masters, located on Amsterdam’s Museumplein. The workday ends with a big alarm, but that plotline dangles a bit. It is much more about these freelancers, whose inner life the reader gets to know chapter after chapter – although it takes a while before you can tell them apart.
Three work in Dumas as tour guides, one speaks in audio tours and one gives drawing lessons. There’s an ex-actress with anxiety disorders, a woman who spends her free hours with strapons, a woman who is bored to death with her good husband, a shy man with a horrific skin condition, a lonely drinking brother who continues to mourn. for his dead mother.
staggered perspective
This sounds very heavy, but that’s not how the novel reads at all – thanks to the perspective that changes per chapter, thanks to Rovers’ fun writing, and above all thanks to his at times sharp and very witty observations. About the woman with the boring marriage: ‘When she and Hent gave each other a kiss, a real kiss, with their tongues entwined, she thought that they were doing something childish or forbidden – a violation of the incest ban. ‘ About the art teacher, who has a hard time forming an opinion: ‘At such moments he became the press officer of his own business, a man who had instructed himself to reveal as little as possible about what was going on inside him.’ Further on: ‘He had resolved at the age of thirty that he would no longer blame his parents and had reversed it at the age of forty.’
In passing, Rovers portrays the cultural scene, embodied in Dumas’s head of communication Raf De Kesel, ‘also called De Rat, De Kwezel or Rat De Kwezel’ – such a Fleming, so to speak, with smooth talk. ‘You didn’t stop innovation, so you had better give yourself completely to it.’ In any case, the writer has a keen ear for contemporary platitudes. Quite a few chapters close by listing the jaded expressions people like you and me use. Such as: ‘reinventing yourself’, ‘will come very close’, ‘giving a place’, ‘a double feeling’, ‘going through the dust’, ‘it felt like a liberation’, ‘does not recognize itself in the sketched image’.
Stepping off the grid
It works very well that the writer occasionally steps out of his own narrative frame. For example, the ‘Tronies’ chapter is filled with mini-portraits of visitors who are walking around in the museum at that moment (just before the big alarm). ‘Junizoro Abe (1941) stared at the large, old hands of the old lady on that canvas by Nicolaes Maes. He had always hoped to marry a woman with beautiful hands and beautiful feet: had he been too picky?’
I also had a lot of fun with Rovers’ descriptions of metropolitan phenomena. For example, his characterization of a catering establishment right behind the Concertgebouw is very striking, which resembles the real Welling café. ‘In Wiendels you could feel young, because there was always someone who walked even more difficult than you, who had had at least one more hip operation, who had more trouble limiting her wine consumption to about five glasses.’ Said lone drinking brother – by far the most touching character of the five – has been visiting once a week for years, ‘and yet he had never become one of the regulars’.
Finally, it is worth noting that most of the chapters bear titles of famous paintings. Sometimes the link with what is described is obvious, sometimes puzzling, but it does work. Before you know it, Google the image in question. It also turns this intelligent, rich novel into a lesson in looking.
Daniel Rovers: Forgotten Masters. World Library; 480 pages; € 24.99.
