Tuesday appears va-banque by John-Alexander Janssen, a novel about a ship owner, a lawyer and a journalist. According to the press release, the novel provides a ‘merciless’ commentary on our time and this juncture is also ‘grilled razor sharp’ by the author. Could it really be?, I asked myself, and I answered straight away: no, time does not allow itself to be filleted, not by butchers and not by novelists. And as for ‘merciless’: presumably time will survive this cowardly attack unscathed as well.
I routinely dragged the mail to the folder in which I collect clichés from the book world as a sad hobby. ‘Filling’ occurs a lot in it. Writers lustily fillet loose; sometimes they fillet the time, usually their mother. As soon as a writer has finished filleting, he is filleted himself, by colleagues and by the literary critics. But the party isn’t over yet, as we saw again last week after writer Jan van Mersbergen expressed his dissatisfaction on Facebook about a review by Thomas de Veen in NRC and weblog tzum quickly typed a news item: ‘Jan van Mersbergen fillets two-ball review by Thomas de Veen’. Filleting is a very big one.
Just like ‘merciless’, ‘ruthless’ also goes well. The two of them have now almost kicked out ‘important’: you come across ‘an important book’ less and less. On the other hand, the battle between ‘merciless’ and ‘necessary’ is far from settled. ‘Necessary’ is a sly little doggy that jumps in all directions with a laugh. Last week I found it in a book about parenting hidden behind a pile of unsuspecting onesies. Millennial Parenting† as the title goes, the back cover says it’s about questions like “Is there still time for an orgasm between diapers and school trips?” Then he comes: ‘Millennial Parenting is a necessary book for today’s parents.’
In search of more original qualifications, I scoured the summer brochures of the publishers. It was disappointing. In addition to being merciless, ruthless and necessary, the new summer books are above all unparalleled, urgent, in-depth, enlightening, brilliant, majestic, revealing, idiosyncratic, gripping and jealous or controversial. De Bezige Bij is the publisher that is the most lavish with adjectives and the Ik Jan Cremer Prize 2022 goes to Ambo Anthos, where a novel by the German author Doris Knecht is unconcernedly touted as an ‘inexorable bestseller’.
Next time in this new language section: why ‘could you say’ is quite a stupid stop and I’ve had it a bit with ‘a real one’, ‘as in’ and ‘but hey!’.