Once in a decennium a book impresses me so much that it turns into an obsession. In 2002 I read ‘Captain Corelli’s Mandoline’. I mourned almost ten years (I’m a slow mourner) for the fact I had finished the book.
The mourning process actually took place in the five stages of grief. First denial: I read it over and over again, but skipped the last page. Then anger. I was angry because I couldn’t read anything else. Every other book felt like an insult to Mister Bernières prose. Friends saw me suffering and kindly suggested literature they were very fond of, but actually they put our friendship at risk suggesting I should read Paustovski or Tsjechov. In the third stage, bargaining, I set myself goals: I had to give this book as a present at least once a week, to spread the beauty. Complete depression I felt when not everyone shared my admiration, to be honest, almost no one I knew. And in the last stage, acceptance, when I had told myself maybe this was just a phase in my life I had to go through to acquire a natural selection of my friends, it happened again. I was really unprepared for this.
I’m talking about ‘Bonita Avenue’ by Peter Buwalda. The title is not appealing at all, nor the cover of the book. I remembered a news flash about it when it had been first brought out. Somebody had torn the cover, in several book stores. At that time I thought that it was just a way of promoting this book, bringing out a rumour that mystifies the public. Didn’t work on me. If it wasn’t for a student, who I gave an instruction to write a book review to practice his praising skills, which were apparently very good, I would never have read it.
By the time I finished the first page, I had stopped reading twice. Firstly to get my highlighter. The metaphors and comparisons were so brilliant I wanted to mark them for my students (‘see, this is how a metaphor should be like’. I stopped highlighting when I saw my book turn into a fluorescent yellow sea). The second time I stopped was to cancel all the dates I had further on that week.
What makes this book so brilliant? I’m not fond of admitting it, but it has something to do with the typical Dutch scenery. What I dislike in other Dutch books, is that writers hesitate to reveal the village or city. They give hints, but they don’t want to spoil their chances for international film rights. Buwalda couldn’t care less. He recreates Utrecht in the seventies, the firework catastrophe in Enschede, the University setting of Enschede.
The troubling part of the book is that there is nothing to hold on to. The characters of the protagonists are extremely complicated. As a reader you are hopelessly trying to cling to a person that you want to identify yourself with. But as soon as you reach that point, that person unexpectedly does something disgusting. At the same time, Buwalda manages to make you feel compassion with the one you were very sure was the bad guy. There are no heroes and no winners.
That’s not new, but the way Buwalda handles it, is. The most intriguing challenge he took on was dealing with subjects you have always considered to be a part of boys magazines: mathematics, judo, pornography. No writer that takes literature seriously would even think of making that central themes.
Buwalda seemed to give priority to the plot, something that partly explains my unbridled enthusiasm because for me, plot is everything. He wanted to write a book in which a successful person, a judoka, finds out that his daughter has a lucrative business in pornographic photographs on the internet. But it can’t be coincidence when he’s on the internet once and reveals this secret. So Buwalada decided to make the judoka an injured one, who changed his career into mathematics, someone who spends his life on probability and statistics. So the plot imposed requirements on his characters. This had very radical consequences for his book. He had to make him a top mathematician, one who won the Fields-medal, but how can you do that when you’re not a mathematician yourself? So Bulwalda had to write at least two scenes that could convince the reader of the mathematic intelligence of his protagonist.
A not unimportant part of my adoration is Buwalda’s own obsession. He knew that if he wanted to have impact as a writer, he would have to give his life to it. In an interview he reveals that he shut himself up for four years and wrote almost manically on this book. He had got a payment of forty thousand euro’s in advance from the publisher to whom he had shown his outline. That’s is not much of a four years living. When he had finished his twenty one chapters, he printed it in a nice font and started to read. It was terrible. It was no good at all. He panicked, called a friend and said: ‘I really need your help.’ But the friend refused and told him he just had to go through this phase by himself. So Peter started to rewrite. He graded every chapter. There was only one chapter that deserved a 6,5 (out of 10), all the others scored between the 2 and the 4. And then the big recovery started. Peter worked his way up until all chapters had a 9 or a 10. It was only then when it was good enough to hand it over to the publisher.
Deep down, during the rare moment I allow myself to look at my deepest ambitions, this is the life I long to. Arrange myself a life in which it is possible to withdraw myself from the social pressure and create literature. Instead of that, I arranged a life that is full of pressure and obligations, apparently because I don’t dare to make the sacrifice and release all safety belts. In this book, the reader is embraced by the sacrifices Buwalda made, by his unconditional devotion to make every word of his story the best one possible. His book leaves us with a terribly paradoxical feeling: a great relief that the scenes of terror are finally over and a deep feeling of depression that it is already over.
Peter Buwalda won two debutant prizes. He was in the running for three prestigious literature prizes but didn’t win. In contrast to my experience with Bernières, I started to read the books that were obviously better than Buwalda’s, according to the jury. Maybe in a few years, when I look back, I can mark this period in my life as the ‘anger stage of the grieving process’ but I developed a complete and coherent conspiracy theory on literature prizes and why Buwalda didn’t win. That will the subject of my next writing task.
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten