The Friendship     by Connie Palmen, Translated by Ina Rilke Original title: De vriendschap Original language: Dutch Original year: 1995 Published by Harvill Press, The Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 0.88 x 8.26 x 5.88 ISBN: 1860465609 List Price: $15.00 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £12.00 Buy online from Amazon.com for $15.00 Published by Harvill, London Not available for ordering

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Four years after the publication of The Laws, her ‘philosophical’ best seller, Connie Palmen attempted to serve up more of the same in The Friendship. If it succeeds at all, however, it is only in the first two sections, which are utterly unlike the earlier book. Indeed these are totally beguiling, written as they are from the point of view of a lively and amusing ten-year old and then, in the second, of her rather more sceptical twenty-year-old self.


We join Kit in the mid-1960s, when she is living in a a rural district in the southern Dutch province of Limburg. She is the only daughter in her family and her neurotic mother wishes she had been a boy, like her three other children. Kit has therefore grown up a tomboy with a liking for anything that is her opposite. She spots this ideal in Ara, a new girl two years her senior at school, and sets out to forge a lasting friendship. Kit, who has always had an interest in people and skill in getting on with them, as well as a love of words, eventually becomes a philosophy student with an interest in behavioural psychology. Ara is dyslexic and prefers animals to human beings; she becomes a successful dog-trainer. Beyond that, the two girls make endless statements about themselves and each other, much of which turns out to be rubbish. One of the book’s themes seems to be about the difficulty of getting to know others, given that one is the prisoner of one’s habits and conditioning. These may equally be the enemies of self-knowledge, however.


Much of this emerges in the book’s third section in which the now thirty year old Kit has grown up to be a self-centred bore and drunk. She turns against practically all human relationships, seeing in them only manipulation, and sets about substituting in her place ‘a body of words, of paper’ as an answer to her problems. As part of the process, she turns against Ara. The final chapter is a confused letter seeking to make up a quarrel on the grounds that she has had difficulty growing up but now ‘prefers adulthood’. Like nearly every other statement she makes, this is belied by the facts. Not only is she a deeply deficient human being but nearly everyone she has been close to has been similarly deficient. Perhaps we are being told that normality is only for the Peter Pans of this world.

‘I don’t suppose we could have a dog, could we?’ I asked my mother the next day, just in case. The least you could do was ask. People do change their minds sometimes and you wouldn’t even know. But my mother hadn’t changed hers, she said she had enough work on her hands already, just with us kids.

I went behind the garage, and from a heap of red bricks I picked out the best-looking one. I went into the garage and brushed it clean, cut a length of twine from the ball and tied it securely around the brick.

‘Come along, Dog,’ I said, ‘we’re going walkies.’

From the yard I called my mother that I was going for a walk — taking the dog, I added under my breath. The brick dragged over the pavement, but I was overjoyed and chattered away to my dog. He had just one failing and that was that he didn’t pull me along, which I’d seen Ara Callenbach’s dog do.

To find out what that felt like I had paused now and then to lift the brick and chuck it ahead of me a little way, but it didn’t feel right and besides it didn’t to the brick any good, because each time it hit the ground it got more chipped and I was left with less dog. That’s no way to treat animals, I decided, and by way of consolation and penance I carried him all the way back home. (p. 25-6, tr. Ina Rilke)