I went to Bommel to see the bridge and, drinking my tea, also walked past the church. No psalm could be heard, but outside, against the north side wall, stood a robust low cabinet, painted in the red of the organ inside. Above it was ‘Children’s books’, and on it the mysterious ‘stray chairs-books-night shelter-collection lending place’. ‘Other’ was painted on a heavy drawer, but the rest turned out to be the unknowable, because there was no movement in the drawer. In the open compartment, a dozen books sheltered from the November rain. I grabbed Looking for love from someone completely unknown to me Fica ten Houte de Lange from 1969. According to the back cover, she was also the author of Where the rumba beckonsa ‘novel about the island of Cuba for Fidel Castro’, also translated into Danish and German – written in 1955, thirteen years before Harry Mulisch added his word to the revolutionary act.
On the cover of Looking for love there is a landscape with trees, work ‘by the writer’s deceased husband’. The blurb speaks of “a tonic for the reader who can still be open to simplicity and warm-blooded imagination.” Hmm. Just opened it anyway; After all, someone had taken this book 54 years back in time. It read, neatly in line with the promise of sweetness: “Five-year-old Stien had been given a finely carved head, wreathed by reddish hair… the still spindly limbs of a lamb… and the promise of exuberant health. ” Immediately afterwards, very bluntly: “But her parents didn’t like it one bit.”
This is how Ten Houte de Lange writes all the time, in the book that consists of five long stories. The reader is always led into a friendly scene, almost sweet, after which the cruelty of man strikes. In the title story, the kind-hearted, hopelessly naive Stien suffers from the lovelessness of her parents. When she realizes that their misbehavior is coming out of the bottle, she is decisively put out on the street with her “pig snout”. “So on that day a milestone was planted in the life of that fifteen-year-old child.”
So looking for love. But whether it is with the painter or the peel farmer, Stien always makes mistakes. One guy thinks she’s too prudish, the next she’s too frank. Add to this the eternal unreliability of the manhood – who says he wants to get married, but always has another pot on the fire – and the lonely fate of our Stien is sealed. As her mother saw while playing cards: “You cannot catch a suitor. Oh, no man’s flesh among the bones.” (Ten Houte de Lange uses a lot of dialect.)
Indeed, Stien’s story does not have a happy ending; opportunism and deceit dominate the world of Looking for love. This is most beautiful in the story of Kwibus, a wonderful boy who saves a child and who discovers that anyone who is mistaken for a strange Kwibus is never simply believed. At the end, I still don’t know whether to cry or smile about it.
Would you like the copy of Looking for love to have? Send an email to [email protected]; the book will be raffled among entrants and the winner will be notified.