To Be Read...

The Reunion, by Simone van der Vlugt

 

"Years ago I went to school in this area. Every day I rode ten kilometres there and back sometimes with the sea wind behind me, but mostly straight into it."

 

Sabine is now 23, working in a bank in Amsterdam, but she grew up just south of Den Helder.

I love cities with a soul, with a historic centre. But the only thing old about Den Helderare the people. All the young people go to Alkmaar and Amsterdam when they leave school. The only people left are sailors and tourists, taking the boat to Texel.

School was a misery for Sabine, who found herself bullied and excluded by a girl who was once a friend. One day, as she is cycling home along the Lange Vliet, she sees her tormentor just ahead. At the junction between Jan Verfaillerweg and Seringen Avenue (Seringenlaan, marked A), Isabel turns right towards a the Dark Dunes.

 

She is going to meet a boy, and Sabine decides to follow her. What happens next has been blocked from Sabine's memory, and might be the reason for the severe depression that means she is absent from work for many months.

 

 

 

One of the many reasons I enjoyed The Reunion is that I have cycled many times through and around Den Helder, staying at Julianadorp, and passing the Dark Dunes (De Donkere Duinen), even catching the ferry to Texel.

 

 

• I read The Reunion (trans Michele Hutchison) as part of my Read the Walk Zoo City Challenge. 

The Moon and Sixpence, by W. Somerset Maugham

Loosely based on the life of Paul Gaugin, The Moon and Sixpence tells the story an undistinguished stockbroker, Charles Strickland, who apparently out of the blue, abandons his wife and career to become a painter in Paris

'Tell Amy it's no good coming after me. Anyhow I shall change my hotel, so she wouldn't be able to find me.'

'My own impression is that she's well rid of you', I said.

'My dear fellow, I only hope you'll be able to make her see it. But women are very unintelligent.'

The narrator is a friend of Strickland's wife who is determined to present a more accurate account of a misunderstood genius than had appeared to date.

"The greatness of Charles Strickland was authentic. It may be that you do not like his art, but at all events you can hardly refuse it the tribute of your interest. He disturbs and arrests."

Strickland is stunningly boorish and unpleasant (in my mind's eye I saw him being played by Oliver Reed): "It is obvious that there was much in the commonly received account of Strickland's life to embarrass a respectable family."

With decided understatement, we are told: "His faults are accepted as the necessary complement to his merits....(but) To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist."

Th artist's personality is at its ugliest when matched against the unbeliebvably generous spirit of an uninspired fellow painter, Dirk Stroeve, who is undeterred from giving money, and ultimately his unfortuante wife, to the monstrously ungrateful Strickland.

Wilfully unable to sell his work, Strickland voyages to the South Pacific, and finds some sort of sanctuary with a Tahitian girl.

Maugham paints his characaters every bit as vigorously as Gaugin. Like Gaugin, many of his values are at best out-dated, but this is a powerful novel.