What do you think are good voices? Can’t you even list that?’ The conversation took a somewhat compelling turn, from which the Book Listener with some difficulty escape managed to find: your ears are not mine. So I’m not going to make lists, it’s just going to be a mess.
I found the proof of this right away a few days after this conversation when I saw the early reactions to an audiobook that appeared in December 2021 and that had escaped my attention for a while: The evenings, read by Gerard Reve himself. According to some listeners he shouldn’t have done that: ‘It’s not pleasant to hear the author/reader swallow and smack his saliva several times in one sentence.’ Followed by: “Too bad Reve reads it himself.” Also the subtitle ‘Volksedition’ that publisher Rubinstein attached to the edition Gerard Reve reads The evenings will not be appreciated by everyone. Who still identifies themselves as ‘people’ today?
We linger in time for a while, with an Oulipian. Hervé le Tellier, the French writer who won the Prix Goncourt in 2020 with anomaly, is in fact a member of the French literary society Oulipo, which stands for Ouvroir de littérature potentelle (Workshop for potential literature). A workshop populated by writers and mathematicians, founded in 1960 by, among others, Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, the most famous representatives being George Perec and Italo Calvino. Still exists, with a lively website full of activities and publications.
The Oulipians produce literary work that must meet certain conditions or restrictions. This can lead to harmless language games in which words in a text are replaced by definitions from the book in which the individual words of a language (indicating certain grammatical characteristics) and the fixed connections in which they are used, with their meanings (in alphabetical order). have been admitted, but also to sisyphoid labor such as Perec did when he la disparation wrote, a novel that does not contain the letter e. Le Tellier was originally a mathematician, later became a journalist, so he has been a writer and Oulipian since the early 1990s. In anomaly he certainly plays a game with the reader, but confuses them more with interventions in time than with his language. Ruben de Goede reads aloud quickly, has a nice diction and he pronounces all vowels and consonants, Onoulipian.
A small step back in time. January 4, 2019, the prepandemium. Historian Jilt Jorritsma writes in this newspaper under the title ‘It is time to accept our chaotic reality, reality simply does not have an ordered plot’, a reflection on the human desire for a larger story and the value of that desire. To stories to live in, to be. To the overarching story, the visionary, the ideological. After all, we had been orphaned for so long, do we really need a new story?
A visionary consideration, we can now conclude, because the virus was yet to come, with a doubled desire for a new world, a new reality, and above all a new story. We didn’t get any of that, of course, but what we did get was a new novel. Jorritsma was still writing it at the time. Used to be appeared last summer and brought the reviewer of NRC to disgust and enchantment. With this, Jorritsma’s literary goal, to leave the reader confused about what he has actually read, seems to have been achieved. In Used to be he also plays with the concept of time and the past can become the present: was is. A bigger story? In any case, a story that must be listened to. Christiaan Koetsier, actor, puppeteer, singer, reads. You can choose what you hear, in any case it is a nice list.