Childhood: Two Novellas

by Gerard Reve, Sam Garret (Translator)

Overview

From the author of the hit The Evenings - two classic novellas that are considered among Gerard Reve's best work

There will be a club. Important messages have been sent already. If anybody wants to ruin it, he will be punished.

Eleven-year-old Elmer inhabits a childhood of superstition, private lore and secret societies that only certain friends can join (and of which he is always president). When a new boy, pale, spindly Werther, arrives in the neighbourhood, a subtle game of fascination and persecution begins.

In wartime Amsterdam, a young boy watches as Germans occupy the city. At first his parents' friends, the Boslowits family, think they have little to fear. Then, slowly, terribly, their fate is sealed.

In these two haunting novellas from the acclaimed author of The Evenings, the world of childhood, in all its magic and strangeness, darkness and cruelty, is evoked with piercing wit and dreamlike intensity. Here, the things seen through a child's eyes are far from innocent.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781782274599
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	03/17/2020
Edition description:	Combined
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Gerard Reve (1923-2006) is considered one of the greatest post-war Dutch authors, and was also the first openly gay writer in the country's history. A complicated and controversial character, Reve is also hugely popular and critically acclaimed. The first English translation of his masterpiece The Evenings was a critical and commercial hit in 2016.

Read an Excerpt

On a Wednesday afternoon in December,
when the weather was dark, I tried to wrench a drainpipe off the back of the house; this without success.
Then I took up a hammer and pulverized a few thin twigs from the currant bush atop a post in the garden fence. The weather remained dark.
I could think of nothing else to do and went to see
Dirk Heuvelberg. (Dirk had, for as far as my memory reached, lived beside us. At the age of four he still had not learned to speak; until the age of three he walked on all fours. I also remember how, when we were little,
he would come running to our kitchen door on all fours: he heralded his arrival with great shrieks. When requested to do so, he would eat horse manure from the pavement. Later, he retained the ability to move quickly on his hands and feet and continued to speak with no little difficulty. He liked to claim, with a certain pride,
that his tongue was too long and too loosely attached;
to support this claim, he would clack it loudly. On that
December afternoon as well, in the back room of his house, he spoke awkwardly and unclearly still, his words bursting and stumbling from his lips. He had remained small. I was eleven at the time.)
A pale, sallow-skinned boy was playing at Dirk’s—one
I had never seen before. Standing by the window, he greeted me falteringly. “He’s Werther Nieland,” Dirk said. From a box of Meccano on the floor they were building a hoist, which they hoped to power by means of a windmill, but they had not started on that part yet.
“You’d be better off building the windmill first,” I
said. “That’s much more important. You need to know how much power it has before you can figure out how to build the hoist. And whether you need to use a large pulley or a small one. And then of course,” I went on,
“you need to pick someone to supervise the construction.
Preferably someone who lives, for example, beside the house with the windmill, or close to it.” I spoke this final sentence under my breath, too quietly for them to hear. A brief silence filled the lightless little room.
(The wallpaper was a dark brown, all the woodwork was painted dark green and the windows were covered in crocheted curtains the colour of terracotta.)
As the silence wore on, I eyed the new boy. He was thin and spindly and a little taller than me. His expression was detached and bored, his lips moist and puffy. He had dark, deep-set eyes, black curls and a low forehead. The skin on his face was blemished and flaky.
I felt the urge to in some way torment him or inflict pain on him underhandedly. “Don’t you agree, Werther,
that we should build the windmill first?” I asked. “Yes,
of course,” he replied diffidently, without meeting my gaze. “He’s a sweet-toothed little creature,” I said to myself, “I know that for a fact.” While Dirk was busy bolting something into place, the two of us looked out of the window at the tilled garden; atop the bare soil lay an old washtub and a couple of weathered planks.
A haze of moisture and settling smoke hung between the rooftops. I moved up close to Werther and, without either of them seeing it, feigned punches at his back.
Although Dirk too was in agreement with my proposal concerning the windmill, we still did not set about building it right away, but remained sitting together,
doing nothing. “Of course, you two don’t have to build a windmill, not if you don’t feel like it,” I said. “But that would be rather silly, for you could learn a great deal from it.” Outside, daylight was beginning to fade.
“Listen, Werther,” I said. “Is your house in a very windy spot?” He did not reply. “Then I could come and help you.” I went on: “Then we could build a windmill you can use to operate machines in the kitchen. It would be no problem at all, I have time enough. And making a promise and not keeping it, I would never do that.” I
was intent on finding ways to visit him at home.
Werther did not respond to my words; perhaps I
was not speaking loudly enough, or perhaps it was the faint music coming from a radio somewhere at the front of the house.

Table of Contents

Werther Nieland, 7,
The Fall of the Boslowits Family, 105,

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Unlike John Williams, Gerard Reve's work was critically acclaimed and sold exceptionally well during his lifetime. But, just like "Stoner", "The Evenings" is brilliantly written, and has a maximum impact on the reader's soul. —Oscar van Gelderen, the Dutch publisher who rediscovered John Williams’ Stoner
'This book, an important classic in the Netherlands and long, long overdue in English, is as funny as it is peculiar. Reve really deserves more attention in the Anglophone world. —Lydia Davis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize

Editorial Reviews

"Profoundly unsettling and haunt[s] the mind for long afterwards." — Sunday Times, Books of the Year

"These two posthumously published novellas show he was capable of enormous and often unsettling power." — Observer

"Enthralling... tales of the joys and pains of life that linger in the mind." — Financial Times

"Reve [has the ability]... to wring menace out of things left unsaid." — Daily Mail

Expertly translated." — The National

"In a distinctive voice that captures childish incomprehension while still conveying what is missed by the still immature mind, the two words collected in Childhood are dark and even unpleasant, but both strong and impressive." — Asymptote Journal

From the Publisher