Cees Nooteboom Rediscovers Ferdinand Bordewijk

In today’s Signandsight.com, there’s a reprint of a Cees Nooteboom article on Ferdinand Bordewijk’s Character. Quite famous in the Netherlands—in fact, in 1988, the film based on this novel won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film—the novel is available in a new English translation from Ivan R. Dee.

I know of no other book whose characters keep each other in such a stranglehold of withheld information, until it seems as if the story itself is being played out in a cocoon of silence, a mute struggle between father and son, with the mother, who refused to marry the father, as the unspeaking third person. Appropriately the other two refer to this third person as “her” and “she” – the quotation marks are not mine, but the author’s. Father and son think of the mother as a woman in quotation marks. Even when they speak, the reader hears the quotation marks around those possessive and personal pronouns. The father is a monster from a Greek tragedy, the mother a saint of almost terrifying proportions, and the son must defeat the father who tries to destroy him, even if that last bit is cast in doubt by the novel’s conclusion.