Henk Broekhuis – Karel van Het Reve clears up linguistic absurdities

Artists express their feelings in their work. Do you agree? Caution: it could be a common place. Or here: reading. Or not? Depends on what you read? Yes, we move in the swamp of triviality, in the no man’s state -free statements. Like this one: In summer we found a nice little hotel in Alsace? This is a rhetorical automatism, since “nobody has ever said that he was in a large hotel, and the message gains something general, reminds of a message that has often been heard and likes to repeat,” analyzed Karel van Het Reve (1921–1999).

He was a Dutch writer like his well -known younger brother Gerard Reve (1923–2006). Under the pseudonym Henk Broekhuis, Karel cleaned up in essays for the newspaper »NRC Handelsblad« with widespread rushes and claims, such as that the advertising force us to buy things that we do not need; Writers enriched the language or comparisons of clarification. 50 years after their appearance, the 39 most beautiful ones are finally in German and give considerable pleasure.

Reve understood these essays as a continuation of the “Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues” by Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), in which he tries to collect generally accepted ideas and views around 1870. Reve Hohn and ridicule pours out about this.

He was particularly impressed by the important thing in the academic habit. He doesn’t like it if someone demands: »The behavior of a novel figure has to psychologically well -founded His verdict is his verdict: “After he is sophisticated the thesis using prominent examples from literary history:” About a book that is only made to the last page as a reader, it can still be said that it is psychologically well -founded. “The term” creative “also creates him. For him there is “no Dutch prose that is worth reading in which the word” creative “appears.” In the Lucid afterword, Arnon Grünberg recognizes his greatest weakness in Reves. “Ernst was also important for him, but if you try to consistently hold on to keep such an attitude, anti-weighting itself also becomes an important thing.”

But that an artist expresses his feelings in his work – does he at least accept that? They already suspect: “I could tell you exactly what feelings I wear while I write these lines. A more banal accumulation of sensations is hardly conceivable … «To make an effort immediately afterwards, which would never have written the» Sonate Facile «, he would have dealt with his feelings. “And do you think that he, who created the Wadden Sea, has only thought of something superfluous as his own feelings for a moment?” Reve, Mozart, God – connected in emotional ignorance: a daring Dutch climate and a real Broekhuis.

Karel van Het Reve: Hours with Henk Broekhuis. Common places and what is to be thought of. Ad Niederl. V. Gerd Busse. Elsinor Verlag, 204 pages, born, 20 €.