Een voortreffelijke ridder.

Kops, Henri

If one recalls that the Netherlands were under Spanish rule From 1633 to 1715, Willem Brakman's choice to resurrect Don Quixote for a reappearance in modern Holland is not all that farfetched: "Through the detailed description of my fantasies during the hours of night I had succeeded in diverting the attention of my demon so that he went out and pulled wild stunts in my stead without hurting me too. I followed him on my little donkey out of a feeling of responsibility."

Brakman hints that the group statue of Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and Rosinante came alive recently at its site near the Juliana Church in The Hague during a riot that involved a large funeral. In Een voortreffelijke ridder (An Excellent Knight) his is but a vague Quixote who takes it upon himself to preach in that church to the reassembled mourners. His unceremonious manner provokes police intervention and his confinement in a shabby prison amid run-down derelicts, most of whom show expectation of a partial redemption of their own in the course of the Don's self-defense before a judge, who eventually sets him free.

Soon the Don convinces himself that the fishing village of Scheveningen is threatened by a giant, and their subsequent combat reads like a strained comical cockfight. When a familiar coach horse is treated cruelly by its owner, the obsessed knight ends the beast's misery with an expert stroke of his lance. His present Dulcinea is a glamorous society lady whom he courts in senescent spurts while she humors her neurotic daughter and a possibly dangerous butcher who attends her tea parties. The hidalgo succumbs suddenly.

In resuscitating Don Quixote, the author chose an individual widely known, frequently pictured, and a common subject of reference. It offered the advantage of abundance, assured recognition, even chivalrous empathy. But Brakman is undisciplined, and not conscious of reader or ridicule, as he spins indulgently skimpy situations and produces laboriously written, stunted episodes devoid of intent or digestible mental and emotional fare. He nonplusses with "Yes and no, or rather just say whatever you wish and I shall believe it, from lies I make truth indeed and say amen to it all beforehand," leaving the impression that he simply scraped together unrelated sentences, surmises, and fleeting thoughts to fill pages. At the novelette's end Brakman claims a degree of metempsychotic identification with Don Quixote. The worthless result of it all is feeble literary waste.

Henri Kops Fort Bragg, Ca.