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October 20, 2022
Vijf korte verhalen, waaronder het eerste verhaal dat Jan Siebelink ooit schreef en dat hem in een nacht tot schrijver maakte. In ieder geval dat is de anekdote die ik het meest terugzie. Alle thema's die Jan Siebelink later in zijn romans uitdiept zijn nu al in de basis aanwezig in Witte Chrysanten en inderdaad, je denkt onmiddellijk aan Knielen op een bed met violen als je dit na zijn bestseller leest.
Het eerste dat ik denk bij lezing van de verhalen van Jan Siebelink is altijd hoe vreemd zijn hoofdpersonen zijn en de situaties waarin zij zich bevinden. Die surrealistische streng religieuze atmosfeer maakt de verhalen van Siebelink nogal drukkend van aard, de totale beleving is er een waar je jezelf in moet onderdompelen. Net zoals in het mysterie van het geloof, overgave aan het onwereldse dat weliswaar geen plekje in de hemel oplevert, maar dan misschien toch een lauwwarme zetel in de eeuwige abri van het vagevuur.
De verhalen in deze debuutbundel lezen vlotjes weg. Dat is altijd een goede eigenschap voor een schrijver. De onderwerpen blijven dicht bij de getroebleerde jeugd en jonge jaren van Jan, zijn verhalen staan bol van gemankeerde sukkelaars die anderen ook het leven zuur maken met hun benepen overtuigingen. Ik vind het een aanrader voor al te optimistische mensen, voor anderen zet het wellicht te snel aan tot identiteitscrisis en depressie. Drie sterren en ik ga door naar de laatste schooldag.
Het eerste dat ik denk bij lezing van de verhalen van Jan Siebelink is altijd hoe vreemd zijn hoofdpersonen zijn en de situaties waarin zij zich bevinden. Die surrealistische streng religieuze atmosfeer maakt de verhalen van Siebelink nogal drukkend van aard, de totale beleving is er een waar je jezelf in moet onderdompelen. Net zoals in het mysterie van het geloof, overgave aan het onwereldse dat weliswaar geen plekje in de hemel oplevert, maar dan misschien toch een lauwwarme zetel in de eeuwige abri van het vagevuur.
De verhalen in deze debuutbundel lezen vlotjes weg. Dat is altijd een goede eigenschap voor een schrijver. De onderwerpen blijven dicht bij de getroebleerde jeugd en jonge jaren van Jan, zijn verhalen staan bol van gemankeerde sukkelaars die anderen ook het leven zuur maken met hun benepen overtuigingen. Ik vind het een aanrader voor al te optimistische mensen, voor anderen zet het wellicht te snel aan tot identiteitscrisis en depressie. Drie sterren en ik ga door naar de laatste schooldag.
June 4, 2023
Jan Siebelink is a Dutch writer, best known in his homeland for the novel Knielen op een bed violen (“Kneeling On a Bed of Violas”). But it was his first book that signalled his arrival, a collection of short stories under the title Nachtschade (“Nightshade”).
Siebelink was a teacher at the time. He spent his free moments reading and translating French. According to a biography by one of his publishers, he had just finished his translation of Joris-Karl Huysman’s À rebours (“Against the Time”) when he sat down to write Witte chrysanten (“White Chrysanthemums”). In one evening he captured the story of his father and touched on all the themes that would appear in his later works. In one evening he had become a writer.
Witte chrysanten opens with the narrator fantasising about beating up some unspecified person, pouring gas into his eyes until they melt, and cutting into his flesh. Only gradually do the circumstances emerge. The narrator’s father is a flower-grower, but while his business is on the brink of collapse, he prefers to spend his days in the nursery, caring for his flowers while praying. Yet in business matters—in those things rendered unto Caesar—he is too timid to act: “He spoke softly, scared of disturbing others with his offers.” (31)
While his father takes refuge in his faith, the son is doing everything he can for the family business. His dealings take him to the shop of Van M., an assertive, unpleasant man who mocks his useless father. After showing him how to tie a bundle of flowers, he lays them on the table and presses the boy’s face into them. His head sinks into the “soft, translucent moss”. He tastes the “juice of bruised stems and flowers”. Van M. sucks on his neck—and perhaps does more—while the boy remains there like “a mortally wounded bull, who, bleeding, expects the final blow that will release him.” (28)
Despite Van M.’s bullying, the family needs his business. This helpless situation is tinged with an oddly placed homoerotic subtext, with the boy drawn inexplicably to Van M. In a matter befitting a maladjusted, repressed, fundamentalist upbringing, the boy’s mental submission finds expression in sexual confusion: “[Van M.] ruled. He was absolutely confident that I would praise him, even though he must have known how I loathed him, how I liked him.” (26)
Yet what the boy endures does not—in his mind—compare to the humiliation of his father, who is a failure, and bringing his family down with him. On one occasion the boy catches him riding back from Van M.’s on a bakfiets (a bicycle with a box on the front, for transporting things) full of crushed flowers. It is the first time he sees him crying.
Years later the boy—now a mildly successful writer—reflects on everything that has happened. By putting the story into words, he obtains the courage to name the man who abused him: Van Manen. Only after internalising his helpless childhood do we see the kind of mental repression he must overcome in speaking the abuser’s name, as though to speak it might inadvertently summon the devil. Yet the boy, like his father, is too passive to confront the aged Van Manen. When he finally does, it is too late: Van Manen has already been dead for a year.
As the narrator celebrates Van Manen’s death, there is a shift in his voice:
All the narrator’s emotions are swallowed up by the joy of revenge. It literally takes over him. The humanity of his voice falls away as it slips into a demonic ecstasy, revelling in the dissolution and destruction of things. The cruelty Van Manen embodies does not end with his death. It will continue to live and thrive and grow within the suffering he caused.
A similar vision of dissolution occurs in Pieter was epilepticus. The narrator recounts a guy who used to frequent his local bar, a heavily medicated epileptic eccentric called Pieter. Pieter likes to talk about religion with anyone who will listen. He has a tendency to lie in order to make himself seem more important and busy than he actually is.
One night the narrator, hoping to flirt with a pretty girl who just walked into the bar, finds himself stuck in an endless conversation with Pieter about God. When Pieter hears a music band marching past, he works himself up into a frenzy and tells the narrator not to follow him onto the train tracks; the train is aflame, he warns, with fires behind every window. His description matches the narrator’s description of the sun setting behind Breda cathedral: “I saw how the declining son coloured the white stones of the cathedrals pink, and it seemed as though there were great fires burning behind the stained glass windows.” (56)
In both stories a fundamentalist upbringing casts a long shadow over the characters. Rather than face his troubles in this life, the father of Witte chrysanten holds out for the promise of eternal salvation in the next. But as soon as the father leaves the nursery, Van Manen is there, a symbolic representation of evil. Pieter, meanwhile, is a nobody who has nothing; though he finds a measure of belonging at the local bar, he realises that all earthly attachments will count for nothing on the Day of Judgement.
While there is no religion in Over een liesbreuk (“About a Groin Hernia”, a terrible title for a story), the same oppressive backdrop bears down on its characters in many small, unusual details. When the narrator’s father plays chess with his Uncle Antoine, they silently preside over “ivory pieces of unusual length.” (7) When he reconnects with Antoine in a bar in Paris, the scene has an inexplicably dangerous undertone: “We felt comfortable in the padded atmosphere of soft piano music, which went unnoticed as it became more excited; of voices, of street sounds that seemed to pile up behind the door and only reached us in a muffled buzz.” (10) Perhaps if the sounds from outside were to reach them, they would be audible and, like the snake from the Garden of Eden, tell them something they weren’t meant to hear.
Antoine is not really the protagonist’s uncle. Rather, he is a friend of his mother’s and fathers. Not long after the chess game, Antoine disappears, and so does the mother. It is implied—but not stated—that they ran away together. The memory of the chess game evokes a kind of self-repression typical of that time, a legacy of Dutch Calvinism:
The father probably does understand these conversations. But to preserve his innocence—to console himself from the fact that his wife is in love with Antoine—he chooses not to acknowledge it.
Antoine is also in denial. He has a hernia, and later testicular cancer, but he doesn’t want to confront what this will mean. When he tries to tell his family, they are too embarrassed to properly receive the news. Antoine is frustrated at them—but only because they won’t use his death as an opportunity to get a new look on life!
One of Antoine’s curiosities is that he breeds Isopods (the Dutch word "pissebedden"is much earthier and uglier). He keeps them in terrariums in his apartment. When he holds soirees he presents the best of them to the most beautiful women to wear as earrings in small boxes lined with purple velvet: “… the shining of the purple and the movements, becoming more abrupt as the evening drew on, caused them to roll up into a sort of spasm. By the end of the party they could no longer stretch out and suffocated themselves.” (9)
Like his Isopods—who are simultaneously dazzled and trapped in the earrings until they die of petrification—Antoine partakes in his Bohemian lifestyle to avoid confronting his morality. Literature assists him: after running away to Paris, he writes his nephew letters in fragmentary, overwrought French. They move him very deeply, seeming to convey things which ordinary language cannot. Here Jan Siebelink also captures a bit of the joy of reading in a foreign language, where meaning seems to sit somewhere behind the words, eluding you until you finally grasp it, at which point it is like a ray of sun bursting through the clouds.
Once the words are articulated, they take on a life of their own. Whether the comment which glides away “like an embryo of thought”, or the fragmentary letters whose whole is implied by its scattered pieces, a story implies a wider fictional reality which the reader—by reading it—participates in creating. Because this reality is not—cannot—be explicitly formulated, it is not delimited by the imagination, and it retains a certain suggestive power. In this way, art goes beyond mere representation and enables us to encounter truths in simulation.
When words are enchanted with meaning, we feel the desire to take refuge within them. For the crippled losers of Siebelink’s stories, that is always a dangerous proposition. It becomes a reason not to address and live in the real world, unless it can be on our own terms. The father of Witte chrysanten would rather pray in his nursery than confront his tormentor. Antoine, like his Isopods, is simultaneously dazzled and trapped in a decadent lifestyle, a soft velvet cloak draped over sharp morality. Only Pieter realises that safety and consolation are temporary things; that is what makes him a madman. His death while attempting to masturbate on the train tracks shows, on the one hand, the unfair burden of religious guilt in his heart, and on the other his acceptance of the divine judgement that he refuses to hide from.
Read this review and others on my Substack.
Siebelink was a teacher at the time. He spent his free moments reading and translating French. According to a biography by one of his publishers, he had just finished his translation of Joris-Karl Huysman’s À rebours (“Against the Time”) when he sat down to write Witte chrysanten (“White Chrysanthemums”). In one evening he captured the story of his father and touched on all the themes that would appear in his later works. In one evening he had become a writer.
Witte chrysanten opens with the narrator fantasising about beating up some unspecified person, pouring gas into his eyes until they melt, and cutting into his flesh. Only gradually do the circumstances emerge. The narrator’s father is a flower-grower, but while his business is on the brink of collapse, he prefers to spend his days in the nursery, caring for his flowers while praying. Yet in business matters—in those things rendered unto Caesar—he is too timid to act: “He spoke softly, scared of disturbing others with his offers.” (31)
While his father takes refuge in his faith, the son is doing everything he can for the family business. His dealings take him to the shop of Van M., an assertive, unpleasant man who mocks his useless father. After showing him how to tie a bundle of flowers, he lays them on the table and presses the boy’s face into them. His head sinks into the “soft, translucent moss”. He tastes the “juice of bruised stems and flowers”. Van M. sucks on his neck—and perhaps does more—while the boy remains there like “a mortally wounded bull, who, bleeding, expects the final blow that will release him.” (28)
Despite Van M.’s bullying, the family needs his business. This helpless situation is tinged with an oddly placed homoerotic subtext, with the boy drawn inexplicably to Van M. In a matter befitting a maladjusted, repressed, fundamentalist upbringing, the boy’s mental submission finds expression in sexual confusion: “[Van M.] ruled. He was absolutely confident that I would praise him, even though he must have known how I loathed him, how I liked him.” (26)
Yet what the boy endures does not—in his mind—compare to the humiliation of his father, who is a failure, and bringing his family down with him. On one occasion the boy catches him riding back from Van M.’s on a bakfiets (a bicycle with a box on the front, for transporting things) full of crushed flowers. It is the first time he sees him crying.
Years later the boy—now a mildly successful writer—reflects on everything that has happened. By putting the story into words, he obtains the courage to name the man who abused him: Van Manen. Only after internalising his helpless childhood do we see the kind of mental repression he must overcome in speaking the abuser’s name, as though to speak it might inadvertently summon the devil. Yet the boy, like his father, is too passive to confront the aged Van Manen. When he finally does, it is too late: Van Manen has already been dead for a year.
As the narrator celebrates Van Manen’s death, there is a shift in his voice:
That night, oh that night I came home so completely, so wonderfully drunk. The stars fell from the sky and settled on me, like diamonds on a ring. I was surrounded by a halo of light and I hovered over the houses and there were no roofs on the houses and like Asmodeus I could look into the rooms and I saw bleak, meagre women with straw-blond hair in tall gumboots who were sniffing dirty underwear. I saw the cruelty of true conjugal life, the sneaking thoughts, the greed and revenge, the mistreatment, the feverish dreams, the masturbating men and women, pale and transparent, wasting away and languishing, yet full of eager lust… it must be the image of the overall ruthless dissolution of things… but I was full of calm, without worry, without resentment… the rings of light around me shined ever more brightly… I saw that everything was good. (38)
All the narrator’s emotions are swallowed up by the joy of revenge. It literally takes over him. The humanity of his voice falls away as it slips into a demonic ecstasy, revelling in the dissolution and destruction of things. The cruelty Van Manen embodies does not end with his death. It will continue to live and thrive and grow within the suffering he caused.
A similar vision of dissolution occurs in Pieter was epilepticus. The narrator recounts a guy who used to frequent his local bar, a heavily medicated epileptic eccentric called Pieter. Pieter likes to talk about religion with anyone who will listen. He has a tendency to lie in order to make himself seem more important and busy than he actually is.
One night the narrator, hoping to flirt with a pretty girl who just walked into the bar, finds himself stuck in an endless conversation with Pieter about God. When Pieter hears a music band marching past, he works himself up into a frenzy and tells the narrator not to follow him onto the train tracks; the train is aflame, he warns, with fires behind every window. His description matches the narrator’s description of the sun setting behind Breda cathedral: “I saw how the declining son coloured the white stones of the cathedrals pink, and it seemed as though there were great fires burning behind the stained glass windows.” (56)
In both stories a fundamentalist upbringing casts a long shadow over the characters. Rather than face his troubles in this life, the father of Witte chrysanten holds out for the promise of eternal salvation in the next. But as soon as the father leaves the nursery, Van Manen is there, a symbolic representation of evil. Pieter, meanwhile, is a nobody who has nothing; though he finds a measure of belonging at the local bar, he realises that all earthly attachments will count for nothing on the Day of Judgement.
While there is no religion in Over een liesbreuk (“About a Groin Hernia”, a terrible title for a story), the same oppressive backdrop bears down on its characters in many small, unusual details. When the narrator’s father plays chess with his Uncle Antoine, they silently preside over “ivory pieces of unusual length.” (7) When he reconnects with Antoine in a bar in Paris, the scene has an inexplicably dangerous undertone: “We felt comfortable in the padded atmosphere of soft piano music, which went unnoticed as it became more excited; of voices, of street sounds that seemed to pile up behind the door and only reached us in a muffled buzz.” (10) Perhaps if the sounds from outside were to reach them, they would be audible and, like the snake from the Garden of Eden, tell them something they weren’t meant to hear.
Antoine is not really the protagonist’s uncle. Rather, he is a friend of his mother’s and fathers. Not long after the chess game, Antoine disappears, and so does the mother. It is implied—but not stated—that they ran away together. The memory of the chess game evokes a kind of self-repression typical of that time, a legacy of Dutch Calvinism:
Sometimes [Antoine] would make a comment. Just like that. Not intended for anyone, it seemed. Merely the embryo of a thought that suddenly took form and slipped away from him; like a balloon which, suddenly inflated, glides from the lips of a young boy. . . My father seemed not to hear these mysterious conversations in which there was much concealed. (7)
The father probably does understand these conversations. But to preserve his innocence—to console himself from the fact that his wife is in love with Antoine—he chooses not to acknowledge it.
Antoine is also in denial. He has a hernia, and later testicular cancer, but he doesn’t want to confront what this will mean. When he tries to tell his family, they are too embarrassed to properly receive the news. Antoine is frustrated at them—but only because they won’t use his death as an opportunity to get a new look on life!
One of Antoine’s curiosities is that he breeds Isopods (the Dutch word "pissebedden"is much earthier and uglier). He keeps them in terrariums in his apartment. When he holds soirees he presents the best of them to the most beautiful women to wear as earrings in small boxes lined with purple velvet: “… the shining of the purple and the movements, becoming more abrupt as the evening drew on, caused them to roll up into a sort of spasm. By the end of the party they could no longer stretch out and suffocated themselves.” (9)
Like his Isopods—who are simultaneously dazzled and trapped in the earrings until they die of petrification—Antoine partakes in his Bohemian lifestyle to avoid confronting his morality. Literature assists him: after running away to Paris, he writes his nephew letters in fragmentary, overwrought French. They move him very deeply, seeming to convey things which ordinary language cannot. Here Jan Siebelink also captures a bit of the joy of reading in a foreign language, where meaning seems to sit somewhere behind the words, eluding you until you finally grasp it, at which point it is like a ray of sun bursting through the clouds.
Once the words are articulated, they take on a life of their own. Whether the comment which glides away “like an embryo of thought”, or the fragmentary letters whose whole is implied by its scattered pieces, a story implies a wider fictional reality which the reader—by reading it—participates in creating. Because this reality is not—cannot—be explicitly formulated, it is not delimited by the imagination, and it retains a certain suggestive power. In this way, art goes beyond mere representation and enables us to encounter truths in simulation.
When words are enchanted with meaning, we feel the desire to take refuge within them. For the crippled losers of Siebelink’s stories, that is always a dangerous proposition. It becomes a reason not to address and live in the real world, unless it can be on our own terms. The father of Witte chrysanten would rather pray in his nursery than confront his tormentor. Antoine, like his Isopods, is simultaneously dazzled and trapped in a decadent lifestyle, a soft velvet cloak draped over sharp morality. Only Pieter realises that safety and consolation are temporary things; that is what makes him a madman. His death while attempting to masturbate on the train tracks shows, on the one hand, the unfair burden of religious guilt in his heart, and on the other his acceptance of the divine judgement that he refuses to hide from.
Read this review and others on my Substack.
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