Yorick Goldewijk, until recently hardly anyone had heard of him in children’s bookland. But that has suddenly changed now that his youth novel Movies that don’t run anywhere is on the shortlist of the new Flemish literature prize de Boon for the best children’s and youth literature. All the more reason to take a closer look at this newcomer’s book.
What is immediately noticeable, Goldewijk daringly draws his own plan. Movies that don’t run anywhere pleasantly deviates from all those piles of realistic stories in which contemporary youthful I-storytellers report in a light-hearted tone of their struggle with their everyday worries. Not that Goldewijk’s protagonist is not at loggerheads with life. As an orphaned child, Cato (12) is even the prototype of the searching soul: her mother died when she saw the light of day; her since broken father goes through life ‘as an empty shell’. Even so, Goldewijk portrays Cato as a lifelike girl right from the start. Thus her anger at the world, in which she and her mother cannot both exist, sounds sincere and palpable: ‘As if reality had decided from the moment she was born to be her enemy.’ This lonely struggle makes Cato a loner, a dreamer who, armed with her camera, curiously searches for things that don’t take your attention for granted: ‘There she found a whole world, hidden in plain sight.’
Time travel adventures
This suggestive phrase is not there by chance. Like Goldewijk’s lyrical description of autumn (“Everything that used to be, everything that would be later. And everything of now, which was already passing in front of you”) it subtly anticipates Cato’s magical time-travel adventures based on the premise that time is neither linear nor fluid. Just as a film consists of a series of successive still images, time consists of still moments that follow each other at lightning speed, according to Goldewijk, who elaborates this idea imaginatively and credibly.
Effortlessly he takes you with Cato to an abandoned cinema – a great set that he eloquently and meaningfully describes as ‘a museum of things past’. There it turns out that a strange old lady who calls herself Mrs. Kano shows films that are not shown anywhere else. Cato discovers that these are ‘memory films’, after which she learns to step into another dimension of time through the white screen, which becomes liquid when touched.
In front of the mirror
The fact that Mrs. Kano also has something ‘familiar’ for Cato suggests that the two have a connection. Goldewijk, however, carefully builds up the tension before it becomes clear what is going on. In the meantime, he plays an ingenious game with the cyclical experience of time, as it is called, in which there is comforting space to find back what you have lost and emotions are given a place. All mysterious events – and that is the power of this reading adventure – are completely at the service of Cato’s inner development and her growing longing for her mother. Beautiful is the scene in which she stands in front of the mirror, dressed in her mother’s red dress: ‘Did she look like her? Would she look like her later?’ Ultimately, Cato understands: ‘people are not always what they seem’. This applies to Mrs Kano, busy neighbor Cornelia, her mother, but also to herself and her father, whom she slowly gets to know.
Sometimes Goldewijk forgets show don’t tellprinciple. When Cato doubts whether she really wants to meet her mother (suppose she is unkind!), it is unnecessary to write that her hesitation stems from the fear of losing her fantasy mother image. But it is not disturbing: Goldewijk is a compelling storyteller. And his magical-realistic children’s book adventure about ‘the melancholy of things that pass and the mystery of things to come’ and how you can ‘make a difference’ now is a real surprise.