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Amsterdam Van Oorschot 1996
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LibraryThing member thorold
This second part of the saga takes the career of reluctant ethnologist Maarten Koning forward through the years 1965-1972. Despite his continuing doubts about the scientific validity of the work they are doing and his repugnance at the idea of being a career civil servant, Maarten, approaching
Amsterdam is changing too, Maarten's colleagues are increasingly moving out to new suburbs and buying cars. Maarten and Nicolien cling on to their provisional, studenty existence for a long time, but eventually they too move out of their little flat in the working-class Jordaan into a grown-up apartment (but they do stay in the city). In the background are all the unrest and demonstrations of the late sixties, but they only have a very marginal effect on the story. Maarten does take a firm political stand when the question of "scientific cooperation" with a South African cultural organisation is raised, and he and Nicolien join a Vietnam-War protest march, but that's as far as it goes.
As in Part 1, what really interests Voskuil is the odd way human relations operate in a workplace setting, putting people into very intimate contact with a small fragment of each other's lives. His episodic narrative style gives the same prominence to disputes about coathooks and shelf-space as it does to weddings and funerals, and he's forever reminding us that scientific committees spend as much time debating changes to their membership, grammatical errors in the Minutes, or the location of the next meeting as they do talking about actual science, and that those topics are often the most interesting and controversial.
Arguably, there isn't much real development in this second part, Voskuil seems to have established his terms of engagement in the first part. But there's so much in the detailed observation to enjoy and (if you've ever been involved in any kind of office politics) to recognise and laugh at. Voskuil writes about stuff other novelists mostly don't find interesting, and he ignores a lot of the things they do write about. He needs his large canvas to show the random and fragmented nature of life — there's one incident in this book where Maarten gets a follow-up to a letter sent thirteen years ago in part one; the matter in question is still unresolved at the end of part two, and we don't know yet whether it's going to be of any importance.
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forty, is now the head of a growing team catalogueing data about popular culture and de facto deputy director of the Office, which is itself growing and has to move into a larger building; he's also becoming an established figure on the European academic committee- and conference- circuit, and a leading expert on the distribution of different types of threshing-flails. Amsterdam is changing too, Maarten's colleagues are increasingly moving out to new suburbs and buying cars. Maarten and Nicolien cling on to their provisional, studenty existence for a long time, but eventually they too move out of their little flat in the working-class Jordaan into a grown-up apartment (but they do stay in the city). In the background are all the unrest and demonstrations of the late sixties, but they only have a very marginal effect on the story. Maarten does take a firm political stand when the question of "scientific cooperation" with a South African cultural organisation is raised, and he and Nicolien join a Vietnam-War protest march, but that's as far as it goes.
As in Part 1, what really interests Voskuil is the odd way human relations operate in a workplace setting, putting people into very intimate contact with a small fragment of each other's lives. His episodic narrative style gives the same prominence to disputes about coathooks and shelf-space as it does to weddings and funerals, and he's forever reminding us that scientific committees spend as much time debating changes to their membership, grammatical errors in the Minutes, or the location of the next meeting as they do talking about actual science, and that those topics are often the most interesting and controversial.
Arguably, there isn't much real development in this second part, Voskuil seems to have established his terms of engagement in the first part. But there's so much in the detailed observation to enjoy and (if you've ever been involved in any kind of office politics) to recognise and laugh at. Voskuil writes about stuff other novelists mostly don't find interesting, and he ignores a lot of the things they do write about. He needs his large canvas to show the random and fragmented nature of life — there's one incident in this book where Maarten gets a follow-up to a letter sent thirteen years ago in part one; the matter in question is still unresolved at the end of part two, and we don't know yet whether it's going to be of any importance.
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Awards
Libris Literatuur Prijs (Shortlist — 1997)