Novel
The Evenings
De avonden
Gerard Reve · 1947
Synopsis
Amsterdam, December 1946. Frits van Egters, a twenty-three-year-old office clerk, lives through the last ten evenings of the year: he visits his friends, listens to the radio, puts up with his parents' habits and invents cruel jokes to ward off boredom. Nothing or almost nothing happens; the cold, the empty conversations and the wait for New Year's Eve fill these evenings, which the young man's irony holds at a distance.
Context
The novel appeared in November 1947 from De Bezige Bij, under a pseudonym, with the subtitle “a winter's tale”; in manuscript form, it had already received a prize. The reception was hostile: a Catholic writer publicly feared for the author's health. Recognition came from 1962, with successive reissues. Maddy Buysse translated it into French in 1970 for Gallimard, and an English translation appeared in 2016.
Who it is for
A novel of about two hundred pages in Dutch, in ten chapters, one per evening. One should know that almost nothing happens in it. It can be read in French and in English.
Prizes and reception
The most famous novel of the Dutch post-war period, and first in the canonical survey of 2002 with seventy-two votes.