The Evenings

The Perils of Being Small

When considering the art of Western Europe, there’s no doubt that Shakespeare, Milton, and Virginia Woolf, et al. have made England stand far above its nearby neighbors. And if I ask you about Russia? You say Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. France? Stendahl, Baudelaire, Camus. Germany? Thomas Mann, Kant, Schopenhauer, Goethe. But what of tiny little The Netherlands? What does the world know of their literature?

While the world knows and celebrates The Netherlands’ contributions to the visual arts (Rembrandt, van Eyck, Memling, van Gogh, Mondrian), most of it doesn’t know about Dutch literature, and that is a pity. Tiny Nederland:

• Experienced all the colonial throes of decolonization à la France
• …and all the burgher-like self-introspection of Germany up to 1930
• …and has a long identification with English literary forms
• …and endured occupation by the political evil of National Socialism
• …and endured the shame and guilt of some of its citizens sending their fellows to death, happily; while others resisted; while others were sent to their death and obdurately failed to die

This ought be a place that produces great literature. And it can be argued that the book that is the starting point for modern Dutch literature is Gerard Reve’s The Avonden or, in English, The Evenings.

It is a book that is about nothing: it is full of absolute boredom. It is vulgar and antiseptic while being deluded and quotidian all at the same time. It’s about the hell of being home, and the hell of being out, and the hell of facing going back home when you’re in the hell of being out. And, by turns, it’s incredibly funny. In a weird way.¹

Plot

The plot is dully summarized thusly: In the post-war era, young Frits van Egters dwells with his parents in Amsterdam. He goes to work perfunctorily. He passes time with his parents to the best degree he can endure, and then in the evenings, he tries to pass time so as to avoid boredom as best he can. His eye on his watch, he endures expectation, society, dances, bars, young families, and the theatre to the best of his ability and then he goes home to avoid boredom by sleep. And in his dreams, he is nearly always visited by night terrors that wake him gasping from their strangeness and horror. And then it’s a new day. And he does what he did yesterday. But, of course, there’s more to it.

What’s Not Said

What’s not said is the whys and the nuances of Dutch society. To cover the subtle rules about being frugal, about keeping up appearances, etc. would take a doctorate to type up. But all those oppressive influences can be captured in the Dutch saying: Do normally, because then you’re doing strange enough. Read the book and feel Frits sense of the contours of what’s allowed.

Moreover, the dancing cavalcade of elephants in the room is never spoken, which is:

DEAR GOD, We were just occupied for years incarnate by the worst impulses of man; and some of us collaborated! How the hell can we go back to cozy tea-times and bourgeois manners now that we’re back to the office? What sort of mass amnesia are we attempting to delude ourselves with?

But that’s exactly what’s happening.² And that’s exactly what the young Frits shows us and what his dreams refuse to let him forget.

But in the daylight hours and in the evenings, such things are never discussed. The war is only glancingly mentioned as a reason that Frits didn’t attend higher levels of schooling. No, it simply won’t do to mention this collective trauma, so we hear nothing of it.

The Mornings

Frits’ daylight hours are similarly only sparely discussed. A trip out for a birthday present for a child and packing up from his office are mentioned, but not dwelt on. His work offer him no relief, he makes no great strides to restore the infrastructure or heal his fellow citizens. He goes to work. Because going to work is what we do. It’s what normal feels like. Even if you awoke that very morning in pools of cold sweat.

The Evenings

Which gets us back to the core of The Evenings: the evenings. Frits has to occupy the time, has to occupy himself, by whatever means possible to handle that defined, but inescapable time between socially-accepted bouts of unconsciousness. He has dinner, he speaks to his parents. He analyzes them and their petty and gross foibles: that his father’s table manner are poor; his mother tends to nag. Unable to tolerate them and/or the absolute nothing happening – his father wearing a robe about the house and reading tomes; his mother bustling in endless domestic diligence; guesses about the weather; the radio snapping on and off – Frits bails out to the cobblestone sidewalks of Amsterdam.

But here is another unmentioned fact: the commercial and “fun” infrastructure of the city was gutted by the Nazis. The restaurants are few and expensive. The bars are few. Whole streets of citizens have been disappeared. Amid this silent oppression, the only “fun” to be had is the company of others. There is truly nothing to do but to suffer, after Sartre, the eternal enfer that c’ést les autres.

And so Frits gives us a tour of his bored demimonde.

• He visits those who have welcomed new life and are attempting to “get on with it”
• He visits those who have injuries gained during war and plies them for medical-grade lurid detail
• He associates with loathsome sociopaths who see God’s abandonment of Creation to the Nazis as an invitation: since all morality is dead, why not do what he likes
• et al.

In each of these dialogue little insight is generated and no healing is encountered, but time, mercifully is passed. And largely, that’s the book, and that’s what I remembered of it from my 1998 reading. But this reading had two new angles.

Reading The Evenings in 2024

The Pandemic Prophecy

In 2024, the book has an interesting resonance. As we lived through the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, I kept feeling like I was living in The Evenings. There was the boredom; there was the promise of time to better oneself, but the will do do so was lacking. There were the horror dreams caused by living in cortisol-soak all day. And there was the omnipresent looming specter of the unknown.

But there was the boredom above all else. Who, under lockdown policy, didn’t start to go a little batty analyzing the nits and foibles of their neighbors, their family, their partner? Who, having exhausted the latest facts of misery (“doomscrolling”), didn’t simply wish they could talk about a baseball team, the weather, or anything that didn’t remind one of the very, very unusual times one was living through? And who didn’t simply wish for those things, but chose to speak of the world as normal simply because the alternative was unbearable anymore? The Evenings already knew this and documented it.

In this sense, this book was waiting for the time when post-war Amsterdam could be the world; and in 2020 it was. While I didn’t seek out the translation until 2022, I had a new appreciation for and empathy with the world of Frits.

A Bourgeois Existentialism

I credit translator Sam Garrett for showing something that I either missed (or lacked sufficient reading skill to perceive) when I first read the book: Frits' story has a distinctly existential quality that has many parallels to Mersault from Camus’ The Stranger.

Mersault is an odd duck from his introduction: “Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday. I’m not sure.” Mersault then does very strange things strangely throughout a sane society him before he commits a murder. On the way to the execution block, he has an epiphany about the nature of life and man’s place in society.

Frits serves almost as a Dutch-mannered (versus French-mannered) Mersault who is bound to “behave normally (see above)!” He’s an odd duck as well, but he seems normal when others are watching him. Yet Frits is carrying the trauma of a thoroughly insane society attempting to rewrite its own ghastly memories. It’s only when he’s secretly plied taboo after taboo (from executing stuffed rabbits to obsessing over parts of his body in the mirror) that he, too, has an epiphany about the nature of life and man’s place in society.

That Garrett’s translation captures the languor of Frits’ existence, his mania, his boredom, and his PTSD so well that his existential epiphany “pops” so obviously (again, credit to the translation) is a credit to his work.

Conclusion

The Evenings has a lot to teach us about trauma, boredom, and man’s willingness if not outright need to forget horror in order to get back to something that feels familiar – even if what’s left is broken, broken, broken. It has a lot to say about what’s happening to man has he moulders in densely-packed, urban civilization. And it gives a surprising, funny, and gross catalog of what your friends and neighbors are secretly doing and thinking as they’re counting the minutes before they can be with you before they can count the minutes to be back home.³

Footnotes

1. Whether intentional or not, many of the most famous episodes of “Seinfeld” share DNA with this book: boredom, finding the subtle ways you’re superior to your neighbors, dealing with odious people who are only odious but for their level of narcissism and selfishness and self-regard approaching your own, etc. Given the way “Seinfeld” resolves, that the erstwhile protagonists are doomed to inflect their behaviors on themselves and each other instead of the outside world, both works share an existentialist conclusion to a humorous look at modern society.
2. And that’s exactly what happened.
3. Seriously: “Seinfeld”