Het Boek van Violet en Dood.

Kops, Henri

Over the past fifty years Gerard Reve has published twenty-seven books, becoming quite well known and well-to-do in the process. His writing is direct, incisive, bitter, and confessional. A jacket blurb for Het Boek van Violet en Dood presents the book as one of the most important works of post-World War II literature. That is surely an exaggeration. The rambling autobiography focuses on the seventy-three-year-old author's teenage years, when he became infatuated with one Jean-Luc. That all but nonexistent relationship was aborted when the young man died from injuries sustained when his car was totaled by a reckless driver. Chapters culminating with Jean-Luc's interment alternate with sensory reminiscences of Reve's formative twenties trader the German occupation. His underground activity helped a Jewish schoolmate escape the Holocaust. These surging, lateral memories do not disrupt the plot line or irritate the reader, so intrinsic are they to the writer's store of experience. Moreover, they diversify the reader's harvest.

Reve enjoys good health but also an abiding pessimism toward life: "I think I felt like an animal which, due to illness or weakness, becomes defenseless and sees a person approach who means well by him. An animal knows this unfailingly." He also confesses that he was often lonely, depressed, and easily guilt-ridden: "I was an ordinary Roman Catholic homo, indeed God-fearing yet free of anguish or hatred toward women." With one exception, the book's sexual passages are imagined or dreamed. Gidean fantasy is evident, but juvenile naivete distances such passages from the work of Jean Genet or the American author-composer Ned Rorem. There is no obscenity, but sadomasochistic inclinations do appear.

The writer's choice of words is fresh, expert, and organized. He constantly addresses his readers with a sparkling touch, even anticipating their questions. His gloom meets with detached resignation, dabs of humorous philosophy, and a hint of mysticism. His keen sense of smell perhaps contributes to his perspicacious observations: "It is not a companionable idea to learn that German pilots who flattened Rotterdam and German parachutists who descended on The Hague were trained in the Soviet Union." Reve's probing volume is candid, disarming, unpretentious, and surprisingly meaty.

Henri Kops Fort Bragg, Ca.