Weg van de pijn.
Kops, Henri
Fifty-year-old Jacq Vogelaar is primarily an essayist, critic, and
commentator. In his fiction he attempts to avoid conventional story
elucidation. Weg van de pijn (Away from the Pain) is a sorry example of
much linguistic skill wasted on a plotless novel that meanders without
discernible purpose or effect and centers on two handicapped fellows,
Ben and Jean. The few other figural appearances are no more than
undeveloped shadows.
At the end of World War II, Ben's parents split up, the husband
abandoning his wife and their eight-year-old son. Three years later,
when she has traced the foreign-born father and is reluctant to care for
the boy any longer, Ben's mother sends him to his father, guided by
Jean, a shifty acquaintance of unstated age. The pair have little money,
but their suitcases contain nylons, underwear, coffee, cigarettes,
chocolate, and lipstick. The whereabouts of Ben's father are
uncertain, the crowded trains they use always old and drafty. They
search erratically in run-down towns depopulated by forced migration and
exuding a hint of menace. They take months to reach Ben's elusive
father.
Deliberately, the author names no cities, offers no clue as to
nationalities; unspecified borders are crossed vaguely eastward, and
languages are qualified only as foreign. A fuzzy mood of war's
aftermath overhangs their hesitant, mired movements. Says Jean:
"You don't so easily find someone who went away, surely not if
he left with the intent to stay away." Ben is treated in a
neglected hospital for a grave ear infection which leaves him half deaf.
On the move again, he develops a split personality, blaming a stranger
inside himself for actions he has done "against his will."
When at last he meets his shirking father, all the man does is take him
to a distant (but good) boarding school and offer to cover the expense
until his son is eighteen. It is hinted that Ben will overcome the
stranger inside him.
Jean's father had built up a successful medical conglomerate and
was disappointed when his son showed no interest in medicine. Jean
instead liked horses, joined a circus quartered in a small town, and
fell in love with Mona, a high-wire acrobat. His father invited them and
several family guests to a fancy dinner, then hung himself in his study
at evening's end. The shock of finding the body induces in Jean an
epileptic seizure and may be involved as well in his delusion that
during Mona's act only his held breath can keep her safely aloft,
that it is he who is responsible when she falls and suffers severe
fractures. He is all wrinkled, a manipulative drifter who hallucinates
recollections of circus life: "He coaxes an echo, an echo from a
voice which died long ago."
Ben is retarded, somewhat autistic, yet sensitive to odors, winds,
the noises in nature, and subsists on acorns, berries, and ferns. His
dangling head and his feet are enormous.
Weg van de pijn is irritatingly cryptic, touched by the absurdism of
France's Boris Vian (1920-59), the imaginative grotesqueries of
Gunter Grass, the pretentious profundity of Paul Valery, and the
ambivalence of Pirandello. Vogelaar's polished vocabulary draws
from his inexhaustible fund of Dutch idioms yet thwarts virtually all
efforts at comprehension. Ineptly presented, the troubled past and
prospects of the two physical and emotional cripples Ben and Jean do not
arouse even grudging commiseration. The absence of medical terminology
or psychological depth also disqualifies this uninteresting book as a
psychiatric case history.
Henri Kops Fort Brag, Ca.
