Today, December 14, marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of writer Gerard Kornelis van het Reve. December is the month that is inextricably linked The evenings and the ‘dark days before Christmas’. But Gerard Reve, as he called himself from 1973, because that name was better for his ‘shop’, is much more than the author of this debut novel from 1947.
He is the writer of an incomparable oeuvre. A master stylist of various genres. From the novella The downfall of the Boslowits family to the Catholic splendid book Concerned Parents. With his famous Travel letters he created a completely new genre in Dutch literature, which influenced many authors. Moreover, Reve was a poet, and as a poet another, special quality of his presents itself: his voice. A voice that gives the melancholic and ironic content of his poetry an extra charge, an extra meaning. Content, style and voice belong together as a holy trinity.
It is the contrast between the dark brown, solemn narrative voice and the content with banal, flat, provocative words that makes you laugh. As in the four ‘own fairy tales’, which have been put on the album under the title I bake them browner. Reve reads to the “lovely boys and girls” about the Duckling Kwak, who poops a large turd of shit from his ass into an aluminum saucepan. In old age he read with a deep dark voice The evenings in its entirety, resulting in a 9-CD box set with a listening time of over ten hours.
But I recently found the most beautiful recording in a vintage record case with seven 45 rpm records Writers’ voices. From 1960 to 1961, Querido Publishers published twenty pictures for 6.25 guilders, each with two authors. In the picture of Remco Campert and GK van het Reve, Reve reads an excerpt from the novella Werther Nieland (1949). A small masterpiece, in which the most important themes of his life and work are already present in a mixture of vulnerability, self-confidence, originality and humor.
The fragment was recorded in 1959. Reve reads the story in a calm, clear voice with that inimitable timbre. You are there when the main character Elmer finds a ‘gramophone horn’ on a piece of land. You smile at his theatrical leadership among friends and you feel his fear in the confrontation with an unknown boy with a “pale, bony face and very light blond hair” who takes the horn.
Reve’s intonation reinforces the realistic dialogue, which fills you with trepidation and compassion. But there are also sadistic fantasies lurking in Elmer: “We have to start the club right away this afternoon, I said (…) For example, if there is someone who keeps picking horns, we will go after him. Then he will be captured.”
Writers and poets are paired together as a duo on the album. Annie MG Schmidt and Han G. Hoekstra, for example, Simon Vinkenoog and Cees Nooteboom. Nooteboom, “the critically ill monkey N”, is still alive, the only one from the record series. Gerard Reve has been dead for seventeen years. But when you read his work, you hear his voice, which sounds lifelike and familiar, like a friend who tells you, with seriousness, jokes and emotion, about his exceptional life.
Reading list