Amsterdam Stories

by Nescio

Paperback, 2012

Status

Available

Call number

FIC NESC

Collection

1st floor Fountainside

Rating

½ (32 ratings; 4)

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Description

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. Gronloh, 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.… (more)

Media reviews

Publishers Weekly

It’s little wonder that J.H.F. Grönlöh (1882–1961) wrote these biting and perceptive stories under the pseudonym Nescio (Latin for “I don’t know”). In most of them a sensitive artist mocks businessmen who slave away in offices and fail to contemplate the beautiful natural world.

Grönlöh himself was an executive of a trading company in Amsterdam, apparently the very embodiment of the middle-class rectitude his characters despise. In this first English translation of his work, impoverished artists and writers seek to escape stifling bourgeois culture. Looking back with nostalgia at the idealism of their youth, these young men are generally regarded by Nescio with a bemused sympathy that can acquire a mocking edge. He trades wit for sensuousness, however, when his characters contemplate the inspiring Dutch landscape. In the best offering, “Little Poet,” the God of the Netherlands is a befuddled old man in a “shabby coat [with] dandruff on his collar.” He is the custodian of business, propriety, and smug respectability, and he and the devil both observe a man realize his desire to “be a great poet, and to fall” from grace. Five of the collected stories, many published in Holland in 1918, are considered Nescio’s major work; the remaining four are inchoate fragments. While his distinctive voice is absorbing, readers who are not familiar with Amsterdam may find the mention of streets, rivers, neighborhoods, canals, and dikes confusing. Yet this is a valuable introduction to a significant Dutch writer.

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Bookslut

Note: This is a review and discussion of Nescio's body of work, most of which is included in "Amsterdam Stories", rather than the book itself.

Nescio’s is a small stage, not Proust’s or Joyce’s, and the characters and images are few. Maurits Verhoeff sees it as classic Dutch “kleinkunst.”

But what there is, is dealt with exquisitely. Without going into detail about the next two stories in the trilogy, “The Tiny Titans,” and “The Little Poet,” it’s worth nothing some of the recurring, contradictory images that bind the three stories together into one aesthetic whole, such as “the huge sun, red and cold,” and “the darkness that once more crept out from the Earth”: the sun is fiery red but cold; darkness comes not from the sky but rises out of the Earth. Nescio plants these near oxymorons everywhere: In “The Tiny Titans,” Koekebakker says, “We were above the world and the world was above us and weighed heavily on us.” Like so many Dutch painters and filmmakers, Nescio is fascinated by the water. Some of his descriptions are like haikus embroidered into the text, calling to our attention water’s property of reflection what otherwise might not be seen (“’Look over there, a rainbow in the water [Japi says].’ You could see the end of a rainbow in the water; in the air there was nothing.”); or calling our attention to water’s ability to change and stay the same (Japi: “A lake has it good: it undulates and just reflects the clouds, is always different and yet the same.”).