Novel
The Deeps of Deliverance
Van de koele meren des doods
Frederik van Eeden · 1900
Opening lines
De geschiedenis van een vrouw. Hoe zij zocht de koele meren des Doods, waar verlossing is, en hoe zij die vond.
The story of a woman. How she sought the cool lakes of Death, where deliverance is, and how she found them.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from dbnl.org
Synopsis
Hedwig Marga de Fontayne, the youngest of a family of five children, grows up in comfort and knows she is different from other little girls. After her mother dies, her father takes to drink and the fortune slips away. At nineteen, she marries Gerard, who is repelled by the body and touches her only out of duty; she sinks into sadness. Sent away from him on a doctor's advice, she meets the pianist Ritsaart and goes with him to England, where a child is born who does not live.
Context
The book appeared at the end of 1900 from W. Versluys, in Amsterdam. Built on the principles of the naturalist novel, it contradicts them on one point: where heredity, upbringing and environment ordinarily condemn the character, the author, who was a psychiatrist, wanted to show that one can free oneself from them. It was at first believed to be the clinical observation of one of his patients, which he denied in the preface to the second edition. The English translation by Margaret Robinson appeared as early as 1902 in London and New York, the German one in 1907.
Who it is for
A novel of thirty-two chapters in Dutch, written in an older language, precise and slow. It helps to know that the book does not judge its heroine and that her crises are described from within.
Prizes and reception
One of the novels of the Dutch canon, the summit of the psychological novel in the language, long forgotten and then defended in 1964 by a psychiatrist; adapted for the screen in 1982.