The new Jaap Robben lacks the oppression of his earlier novels

In his first two novels, Jaap Robben keeps it small. His debut Birk (2014) is set on a virtually uninhabited island where a 9-year-old boy has to rely on his mother after his father drowns. summer coat (2018) is about a 13-year-old boy who lives in a caravan with his father, a clumsy hustler who gets increasingly into trouble. How do you live with decency when you grow up with a parent who doesn’t know how to do that? How do you survive in such a small world where you are not yet in control of yourself? In both novels Robben cleverly developed these questions into an oppressive story that is cast in a strict language.

Twilight Life is cut from a different cloth. The story is told by an 81-year-old woman who looks back on a life that you could call ordinary in almost every way. Frieda Tendeloo did not grow up in isolation but was born and raised in a big city (Nijmegen), was raised by both parents in a family rich in children, worked in a florist’s shop, married a nice man, had a son with him and now stands about to become a grandmother.

But then her husband Louis, against all odds, dies before she does. His death cuts short, also for the reader: ‘All that Louis has ever been, all that I have ever loved is a dusty pile of ashes (…). Everything that Louis has washed, polished, flossed, combed and cared for all his life, everything that he has been is here for me among the blades of grass. (…) Ready to blow away.’

Louis’ death also cuts in on another aspect. Combined with the pregnancy of Frieda’s daughter-in-law, it exposes a whopping trauma that had lurked beneath her average life as a married woman and devoted mother for over sixty years. Frieda (nickname: Ietje) had her moods now and then (especially after the family had once again visited her parents) and then there was no country to sail with her, but no one to look for anything further.

secret relationship

The trauma was caused by the dramatic conclusion of a secret relationship she had in 1963 with a married man, Otto Drehmann. He was over ten years older than her, but you wouldn’t call him a seasoned scumbag. He’s too clumsy for that, just to name a few, the first time they do it together. You could also put it this way, in the style of the novel: just as Frieda discovers the woman in himself in him, in her he discovers the ‘other man’ in himself.

But Otto doesn’t want to leave his wife. ‘I just seem to have more love in me, for both’, he justifies his attitude. That doesn’t sit well with Frieda, of course: ‘I was allowed to lose myself in him, but he could never completely lose himself in me.’ This becomes painfully clear when she becomes pregnant by him. To her astonishment, he does not see the fruit in her belly as their child, but as her child. His marriage, his job in college, his position in the church, he doesn’t want to give it all up for a new life with her.

Dickens-esque allure

Not only Otto, but also her parents abandon Frieda. Robben describes the misery she then ends up in with Dickens-like allure and that produces penetrating pages. The passages about Louis’s death and Frieda’s move to a care home are also impressive. And there are sentences in it Twilight Life that stay with you, like this one, which Frieda comes to mind when the receptionist at the home tells her that she looks beautiful again: ‘At my age they mainly compliment the clothes we have put on or what the hairdresser thinks about the hair. managed to make.’

But Robben’s new novel lacks the ubiquitous oppression of Birk and Summer coat. It has to do with the storytelling perspective of twilight life, that is emphatically that of an adult, while in Robben’s first two novels you have the idea of ​​experiencing the events with the young protagonist. And in general, Twilight Life told in an adequate style, but often no more than that. And sometimes less than that, as in this kitschy passage: ‘He hardly had to touch me between my legs before I felt the smoldering embers being blown to a glow.’ Also the frequently used exclamation ‘What the hell (…). Oh my, isn’t it.’ and variants of this are out of place. In moments like these, Twilight Life something Frieda is absolutely not: a bit dowdy.