The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy Translated by Richard Huijing (Anthology) Original language: Dutch Published by Dedalus Pub. Date: 1993 Format: 376 pages ISBN: 0946626693 List Price: $16.95, £10.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £10.78 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.87

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Thirty authors are featured in this anthology, spanning almost a century, from 1895 to 1990. The pieces range from novella length (and one extract from a novel) to short stories a couple of pages long. Authors appear alphabetically, so that styles and periods are jumbled together; there are, however, biographical and bibliographical notes at the back for anyone wishing to read them in a different order.


The Dutch conception of fantasy is wider than the English, ranging from the absurd to exercises of imagination that we would consider straightforward stories or assign to different genres. Jan Wolkers’ ‘Feathered Friends’, for instance, concerns a disgruntled husband’s rather unorthodox murder and disposal of the body of his wife and could equally well be classified as high-spirited crime fiction. Where the English use everyday detail simply as a foil to the irruption of abnormality into their stories, detail for the Dutch is the main point and any slight departure from the normal seems to be considered fantastic.


To help themselves into thiher hand, in that this is the product of anxiety in the wake of Nazi persecution of ‘lesser races’, it can also be compared to the Vladimir Nabokov of Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister. From the absurdist side, we find something of Kafka in Frans Kusters’ ‘The Full Diagnosis’, with the patient as uncomprehending victim. Jan Arends’ ‘Breakfast’, on the other hand, is pure Ionesco: here the oldest inhabitant of an old-folks’ home turns, not into a rhinoceros but a monkey.


There are still plenty of stories which would grace any anthology of the ‘Fantasy and Science Fiction’ type. Louis Couperus provides lively sequels to the Bluebeard and Don Juan legends while Helène Nolthenius puts Orpheus on trial before a jury of feminist Maenads for finding his wife Eurydice a chattering bore. Willem Schòrmann’s ‘The Unbalanced King’ tells of a self-doubting monarch who takes up with a company of strolling players and comes to the puzzled conclusion that the nature of reality is a question of context. This Wildean parable appeared in 1910 and so anticipates the postmodernist stance by many decades.


Another piece of prophetic writing occurs in Harry Mulisch’s ‘Decorated Man’, in which the seaman Bernard Brose is sent out in a miniature submarine to blow up a dictator’s steamship during a ruinous war. Written in 1959, it refers back to the mechanisation of death during World War Two but also anticipates the further dehumanisation of death-dealing by technologies undreamed of then. The significance of the individual life shrinks to a mere statistical abstraction.


It is not only war situations such as those described by Belcampo and Mulisch that bring dehumanisation in their wake. These are only special cases of acquisitive materialism. Marcus Heeresma’s chilling ‘Dumping Ground’ takes place on a huge garbage dump in Lima where the supercilious protagonist, engaged in dumping inferior First World goods on Third World countries, meets a sticky end at the hands of the dispossessed he despises and exploits. Inez van Dullemen sets her ‘After the Hurricane’ a little further north on the Gulf coast of the U.S. and writes a sombre elegy for consumerism. Not only are the hurricane’s victims overwhelmed by natural forces but their artefacts are turned by it into the means of their death.


Some of the most stylish writing in this collection is provided by minor poets. Johan Andreas Dèr Mouw contributes a pure prose poem deeply tinged with mysticism, while Fritzi Harmsen van Beek’s ‘The Taxi Pig’ is a series of baroquely orchestrated sentences defining a preposterous situation in much the same manner as her verse. Simon Vestdijk, a prolific poet as well as novelist, begins in realist mode and goes on to relate a chance encounter with an eerie stone head on an isolated house which re-enacts for him the night of his father’s death. The best stories in the anthology though are, in fact, provided by novelists. For example, Gerard Reve’s ‘Werther Nieland’, one of the classic stories of modern Dutch literature, is a chilling tale of childhood in which everyone appears slightly mad. It is only gradually that we come to realise that this has more to do with the outlook of the eleven-year-old narrator, who is something of a budding psychopath.


Equally striking, but for very different reasons, is P.F.Thomèse’s ‘Leviathan’, the first section of his Zuidland. Its form is like that of Jim Crace’s Continent — a series of extended short stories which build up a picture of a magical land. In Thomèse’s case it is not purely imaginary but a recreation of Brueghel’s ‘southland’ — not that of his carefree peasants (in ‘Leviathan’ at least) but of ‘The Triumph of Death’. By entering the heads of a succession of characters, the author brings to life the spirit of a totally alien time in much the same way as Umberto Eco does for the Middle Ages in The Name of the Rose. Recreation, in fact, seems to be considered an important facet of Dutch fantasy. One might cite two final examples: Anton Koolhaas’ subjective account of a spider’s life and Frans Kellendonk’s ‘The Death and Life of Thomas Chatterton’, the monologue of Horace Walpole, the man who was blamed for Chatterton’s suicide.

I’m deep below the convoy, Brose thought. It suspects nothing. It’s a colossal floating creature, held together internally by wireless nerves. A signalling aircraft, a train thundering across points, a ship with people inside: these are creatures of a higher biological order than a human being. Offices, the cuckoos of singing churches, smoking factories, cinemas shaking with laughter, are bodies with forms of consciousness above the comprehension of man, the way the cells of a body know nothing of the individual they collectively have formed. Brose thought and thought; he thought so as not to think. Cities, states, continents¼Before his eyes he saw consciousnesses piled up like an inverted pyramid disappearing ever wider and hazier in a darkness forever darkness. (p. 213; Mulisch, ‘Decorated Man’)

All was movement, eddies, waterspouts, wind that cut off your breath. Furniture, driven insane, panicked into a stampede like animals, shattered everything that got in their way, smashing each other to pieces, to smithereens: all those possessions that had always stood, good as gold and ready to serve, in kitchen-diners or sitting rooms, now rampaged at us, random, in an annihilating attack of rage. We ended up trapped in between, our bodies ripped open like squishy melons. More people were done in by furniture than by the water, I should say. You had to fight cupboards, beds, trapdoors, chairs; all those consumer goods you had cherished now seemed to be out to crush your ribcage, to pile on top of you and push you under the water. (p. 122-3; Van Dullemen, ‘After the Hurricane’)

Next day I put the sticklebacks I had gone to catch immediately after school inside the vase instead of throwing them into hedges or down sewers or on to the street, as I was wont to do. I looked at them through the glass which seemed to enlarge them slightly. Soon they were boring me already. I scooped them out, one by one, and with a paring knife I cut their heads off. ‘These are the executions,’ I said softly, ‘for you are the dangerous water kings.’ (p. 234; Reve, ‘Werther Nieland’; tr. Richard Huijing)