Novel
Alienation
Willem Mertens' levensspiegel
J. van Oudshoorn · 1914
Opening lines
Hij draalde aan de glazen-als-winkeldeur.
He lingered at the glass door that looked like a shop door.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from dbnl.org
Synopsis
Willem Mertens, a bank clerk in his thirties, has no company but his colleagues and Helene, a bar girl he cannot bring himself to leave. He drinks, dips into the bank's till to cover his debts and ruminates on his childhood and youth, of which he has kept the shame and the feeling of having missed everything. His colleagues, who want to get rid of him, arrange for him to be offered a promotion at another branch; but to leave, he must first repay what he has taken.
Context
The first novel by its author, largely autobiographical, it was written from the end of 1910 to the summer of 1912, in Berlin, and appeared in mid-1914 from W. L. and J. Brusse, in Rotterdam, in five hundred copies, of which only a hundred were bound. Its sombre tone earned it a mixed reception. The present of the narrative is constantly crossed by memories of childhood and youth. N. C. Clegg translated it into English in 1965, in a volume that brought together two Dutch novels.
Who it is for
A novel of about two hundred pages in Dutch, dark and introspective, in which the past keeps returning. An old English translation exists.
Prizes and reception
By an author admired by Nijhoff, Vestdijk, Hermans or Maarten 't Hart; cited in 2002 among the country's forgotten classics.