Oh! While the first layer of December ice shines at Ice Club Ankeveen, I melt. Barely a hundred meters from the water, ‘Bookhouse’ is written in thick red letters on the window, but much more striking is the elegantly written message in yellow underneath: ‘In loving memory of Annelies’. What a beautiful monument and what a great idea. Is there a better form of immortality than living on as a bookcase, where passers-by can occasionally take something beautiful out of you? I want that later too.
But first read. The disadvantage of such a moving box (would Annelies have read all these books?) is that the question is whether the book can match the box. I choose Cousinsa fairly recent novel (2022) by Peter Middendorp (1971), a fine writer and columnist of De Volkskrant. He takes us on the boat to Schiermonnikoog with the cousins from the title, Robert and Arie. They look, or seemed, very similar because they are double cousins: their fathers were brothers and their mothers were sisters. “So genetically we are almost brothers, as good as brothers.”
Narrator Robert quotes his father: “If you throw Robert through the fence, you can fix him with Arie. There was nothing to say against it, although it bothered me that he never turned us around, I was always the one who had to get through the fence.” Middendorp likes to write seemingly careless sentences that stick in the back of your mind with a barb. A long way later it becomes clear how meaningful those sentences are. Something is wrong with that father, as it turns out – and not with him alone. What’s more wrong is that everyone in this novel, as Middendorp writes, is “short on the head”.
Robert and Arie have spent most of their lives as inseparable cousins, with Arie being slightly more muscular, smarter, smarter and more successful than Robert – at least that’s how the latter explains it. They played together, tried college at the same time and ended up in the pot business together. That is, Arie was the merchant who paid Robert to use his room as storage. Other elements are the lure of bourgeois life, family, jealousy, addiction, mistaken identity, the urge to survive, a shadowy trader named Eddie Meta, a curb, an accident by Arie that Robert has to deal with.
Actually exactly what you can expect from a novel that starts with a sentence full of doom in which the ever-beloved Wadden Sea is described as “the rotting, stinking onland […] in which you cannot take a step without sinking up to your groin in it.”
Cousins is as exciting as a Dutch thriller, but that is not the main point. Middendorp’s images increase in expressiveness as you read further into the book or if you – like me – read the book again. The most beautiful image is that of the cousins as two valves of the same shell. Already on that boat to Schier, a man says: “Did you know that the right valves are carried along with the current and only the left valves wash up on the beach?” Ultimately, that is the story: the irrevocable falling apart of the halves and the desperate attempt to bring them together. Separating and uniting in life and death, there goes Cousins about – and that came together in the memorial box for Annelies in Ankeveen.
Would you like to have the reviewed copy of Neven? Send an email to [email protected]; the book will be raffled among entrants and the winner will be notified.
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