Amsterdam Stories (New York Review Books Classics)
Nescio
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN: 1590174925
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
No one has written more feelingly and more beautifully than Nescio about the madness and sadness, courage and vulnerability of youth: its big plans and vague longings, not to mention the binges, crashes, and marathon walks and talks. No one, for that matter, has written with such pristine clarity about the radiating canals of Amsterdam and the cloud-swept landscape of the Netherlands.
Who was Nescio? Nescio—Latin for “I don’t know”—was the pen name of J.H.F. Grönloh, the highly successful director of the Holland–Bombay Trading Company and a father of four—someone who knew more than enough about respectable maturity. Only in his spare time and under the cover of a pseudonym, as if commemorating a lost self, did he let himself go, producing over the course of his lifetime a handful of utterly original stories that contain some of the most luminous pages in modern literature.
This is the first English translation of Nescio’s stories.
the same. You could see that they had everything figured out: A suit was a suit, same as ever, and a jacket was still a jacket, and a respectable woman was still a respectable woman and a girl was a girl. It all worked out perfectly. And they also knew perfectly well who and what were beneath them, I had no doubt about that. The Damrak would certainly be filled in too once they got around to it. I took Tram 2 down Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. So it was a good thing they’d filled it in after all,
admit. Hoyer still didn’t notice anything. Upstairs I recovered a bit, at least there was light, the famous “studio light.” The easel stood empty. There was an expensive chair in the studio and I sank into it. Never in my life had I sat in such a chair. Hoyer was painting portraits these days, of ladies and gentlemen, all in elegant clothing. He showed me the portrait he had just started of the lawyer in the building. She was traveling at the moment. Hoyer used to have his studio in another
her, for Mien, and then they all laughed because they knew better. She stamped her little seventeen-year-old schoolgirl foot on the ground. “For me? That creep?” and she threw back her head. And he was unhappy. He counted the hours. At eleven at night he looked up at the sky. It was exactly halfway from one thirty in the afternoon to eight thirty in the morning. And he wrote poetry. He composed poems imitating Heine, in Dutch and German, poems after Hélène Swarth and Kloos and Van Eeden. THE
HOURS How heavily tread the hours with pond’rous gait. THE CRUSADERS (this one in German) Down below, the Holy City Lay outspread in all its glory. That was her. Unfortunately the gates were shut tight. He wondered why he should go on living. And he rebelled against God. My God, will my torments never find an end? He couldn’t bear to look at the people in his office; as soon as he arrived at a quarter past nine he felt like hitting someone. And then he would suddenly be transformed
years have passed since 1917. From 1897 to 1917 was twenty years too, but those were years of a completely different kind. You create a world of your own, you reject this and take a close look at that, you discover, you add more, and finally you see that it is good. And then the disintegration starts, slowly at first, you barely notice it and don’t realize what’s happening. What you’ve worked so hard to make your own— what you love—disappears or changes into something unrecognizable: landscapes