The narrator in winterthur, Alexander Nieuwenhuis’s debut novel (1984), has no name and that’s not the only thing we don’t know about him. Who is he? What is his background? How old is he actually? What is his private life like? What nationality does he have? Nieuwenhuis leaves it all in the middle. One of the few things he mentions is that his character is a writer. But then again he doesn’t say what kind of writer he is and what he has written (except that he can’t live off the pen).
A blank slate, that’s what Nieuwenhuis’ narrator probably most resembles. A conduit, that would also be a good description. Thanks to this narrator without significant qualities, the stories of the people he meets are given all the more space. And then, almost between the lines of what others tell him, the narrator slowly but surely takes on more concrete contours.
Club of Rome
In the first sentence of the second chapter, Nieuwenhuis seems to lift a corner of the veil: ‘I had come to Winterthur to investigate the Club of Rome.’ We hear Nijhoff echoing this, but he does not elaborate on what exactly the I want to investigate, why and for whom he wants to do this. Meanwhile, on a mountain near Winterthur, he met Antonin, who once earned his living as an electrician and now lives in the woods.
The narrator briefly puts the Club of Rome in the waiting room, intrigued as he is by Antonin. The forest dweller tells him about Sabrina Haettenschweller, an archaeologist who turned to science after learning about the work of the pioneering naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). But she shared Von Humboldt’s optimistic belief in (Western) science less and less. “The closer we look,” she told Antonin, “the less sure we are that we’re still seeing something.”
Haettenschweller’s skepticism about von Humboldt’s paradigm did not prevent Antonin from following in the footsteps of the German scholar across Latin America. The narrator is given access to the diaries that Antonin kept during his journey. “They gave me the impression,” he writes, “that Antonin had descended from the overcrowded Swiss mountains to the Latin American coast, where he lived with the animals and turned away from language, in a kind of protracted naturalization process.” But why had Antonin gone back to Switzerland? The answer to this question may be banal (it was a bureaucratic matter), but the ultimate consequence of his return (which we cannot reveal here) is anything but.
The narrator also sees little in Von Humboldt’s views on science. It is an illusion to think ‘that science can solve all problems if the right information is known and that natural resources will never be exhausted’. The history of the Club of Rome is depressing proof of this. The alarming report issued by this group of scholars in 1972 (The limits to growth) caused a lot of controversy, but instead of investing in sustainable energy and slowing down consumption, the governments more or less let things take their course. The narrator talks about it extensively with some members of the Club of Rome (Jørgen Randers, Dennis Meadows, Ugo Bardi).
No call for action
One might deduce from Antonin’s history that going back to nature is a dead end, while the history of the Club of Rome in turn teaches that science is in fact talking to the benches when it proclaims with the force of evidence that a radical change of course is vital to the survival of humanity.
But winterthur is not a five-to-twelve alarm and does not call for action. At least, not in so many words. The narrator already seems to have resigned himself to the fact that there will be ‘a great collapse’, a concept that he drops several times without much emphasis. A similar resignation is steeped in the final scene, in which the narrator comes face to face with the rapidly shrinking glacier Mer de Glace.
winterthur is a debut that matters, but falters here and there. That’s because Nieuwenhuis sometimes formulates clumsily (‘because he got bored with the business world’, a bit of an Anglicism and there are more). He also has a tendency to write a bit perky (‘Completely alien to the Swiss temperament’) and is occasionally tempted by esoteric clichés (‘All the time everything talks to us. How come I never have this? heard?’). That could be better.
Alexander Nieuwenhuis: Winterthur. Van Oorschot; 174 pages; € 20.
