Cheese: Newly Translated and Annotated

by Willem Elsschot, Sander Berg (Translator)

Overview

When the ambitious but inept clerk Frans Laarmans is offered a job managing an Edam distribution company in Antwerp, he jumps at the chance, despite his professed dislike for cheese in all its forms. He soon finds himself submerged in a bureaucratic nightmare as his complete incompetence becomes apparent. Meanwhile, his offices fill up with a seemingly infinite supply of the distinctive red-skinned cheeses, which he has no idea how to sell.

Skewering the pomposity of big business while revealing how an entrepreneurial spirit can often be a mask for buffoonery, Willem Elsschot's Cheese combines comedy and pathos in its depiction of a man trying to progress beyond his limited skill set. As poignant as it is funny, Cheese will appeal to anyone who has suffered the endless indignities of office life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781846884160
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	10/20/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Willem Elsschot was the pen name of Alphonsus Josephus de Ridder, an Antwerp advertising executive who became an icon of Flemish literature. His concise, witty and often cynical novels satirize the mundanity of twentieth-century life and are cherished throughout Belgium and Holland.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

I'm writing to you again at last because great things are about to happen, and it's all Mr van Schoonbeke's doing.

    I should tell you that my mother has died.

    A nasty business of course, not only for her, but also for my sisters, as the vigil nearly killed them.

    She was old, very old. I don't remember precisely how old to the exact year. She wasn't really ill, just thoroughly worn out.

    My eldest sister, with whom she lived, was good to her. She soaked her bread in milk, made sure she went to the toilet, and gave her potatoes to peel to keep her occupied. She peeled and peeled as though she had an army to feed. We all took our potatoes to my sister's, and on top of that Mother did the lady's upstairs and a couple more neighbours' besides, because once, when they'd tried giving her a bucket of potatoes that were already peeled to repeel, because stocks were low, she'd noticed and actually said, 'They've already been peeled.'

    When she couldn't peel any more, because she could no longer co-ordinate her hands and eyes very well, my sister gave her wool and kapok which had been compressed into little hard lumps through having been slept on, to pick apart. It made a lot of dust and Mother herself was covered in fluff from head to toe.

    It went on and on, day and night: dozing, picking, dozing, picking. Punctuated by the occasional smile, God knows at whom.

    She couldn't remember a thing about my father, who'd only been dead about five years, even though they'd had nine childrentogether.

    When I went to visit her, I used to talk about him occasionally to try and put a spark of life in her.

    I'd ask her if she really couldn't remember Chris (that had been his name).

    She made a terrific effort to follow what I was on about. She seemed to grasp that she needed to grasp something, leaned forward in her chair, and stared at me with her face all tense and the veins in her temples bulging: like a guttering lamp threatening to go out with a bang.

    After a little while the spark would be extinguished again and she'd give you that smile that went right through you. If I pressed her too hard she'd get frightened.

    No, the past no longer existed for her. There was no Chris, no children, just picking kapok.

    There was only one thing that still played on her mind: the thought that a last little mortgage on one of her houses hadn't been paid off yet. Was she trying to scrape together that piffling amount before she went?

    My sister, bless her, would talk about her, while she was present, like someone who wasn't there: 'She ate well. She's been very tiresome today.'

    When she couldn't pick any more she sat for a time with her blue, gnarled hands placed parallel on her lap or scratching at her chair for hours as though she couldn't stop picking. She could no longer tell yesterday from tomorrow. All that either of them meant was 'not now'. Was it because her sight was failing or because she was tormented by evil spirits the whole time? At any rate, she no longer knew whether it was day or night, and got up when she should have been in bed and went to sleep when she was supposed to talk.

    If she held on to walls and furniture, she could still walk a bit. At night when everyone was asleep, she'd totter over to her chair and start picking kapok that wasn't there, or hunt till she found the coffee grinder, as though she were about to make coffee for some crony or other.

    And she'd always have that black hat on her grey head, even at night. Do you believe in witchcraft?

    Finally she lay down and when she calmly allowed the hat to be taken off, I knew she wouldn't be getting up again.

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Excerpted from Cheese by Willem Elsschot, preface by Paul Vincent. Copyright © 1969 by Erven Alfons Josef De Ridder. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Editorial Reviews

Originally published in 1933, this classic Dutch comedy tells the tale of a determined but misguided marine shipping clerk enmeshed in a cumbersome cheese-centered farce. In early 1930s Amsterdam, a friend of a friend offers 50-year-old Frans Laarmans a position as an Edam cheese distributor. Laarmans isn't fond of cheese upon visiting a cheese shop, he observes, "The Roqueforts and Gorgonzolas lewdly flaunted their mould, and a squadron of Camemberts let their pus ooze out freely" but he is willing to snatch at any opportunity to escape his drab job at the shipping yards and enhance his social standing. Despite help from his wife, who is a bit sharper than her husband in business matters, Laarmans finds his new occupation exhausting. Before selling his first Edam, he wastes days searching for a typewriter to write up receipts for unmade sales and hours searching shops for a desk. In the meantime, 10,000 wheels of Edam are delivered. When he is informed that his supervisor is en route to meet him and settle accounts, Laarmans frantically struggles to make a sale. Doomed from the start, his final weak efforts are to no avail, and even his one success is ill timed. The book's poker-faced humor falls a bit flat in translation, though Laarmans's ordeal makes for nail-biting reading, and Elsschot's class commentary is astute. (Apr.) Forecast: The small trim size, bright jacket and low price point may make this an appealing gift buy, though Elsschot's particular brand of dry humor won't be to everyone's taste. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

"Elsschot" (1882-1960), whose real name was Alfons de Ridder, was the Dutch Italo Svevo: an advertising executive whose rueful comic novels dramatized the plight of the "little man" in a busy world with a rare combination of comedy and pathos. The protagonist here is Frans Laarmans (who appears elsewhere in Elsschot's fiction), a nondescript shipping clerk whose promotion to European agent for his Antwerp firm's Edam cheese plunges him into a nightmare of obligation and bureaucratic complexity. As Laarmans frets and panics, hundreds of wheels of Edam sit, and stink-ripening into an ingenious metaphor for the burdens imposed by their reluctant possessor's frenzied pursuit of status and security. A 1933 masterpiece, published here for the first time, and one that's enormous fun to read.

Kirkus Reviews