De Walsenkoning: Een Duik in Het Autobiografische Diepe.

Kops, Henri

"I had a father who was my grandfather, a mother who was my grandmother, an aunt who was my mother, another mother who was no One and myself who was even less than no one." Louis Ferron's "plunge into the autobiographical deep" indulges today's trend of explaining ourselves through our family and surroundings but shrugging off responsibility. His mother was not married. When his German immigrant father was drafted into the Dutch army, his barren wife Agnes fled to relatives in Bremen, taking along the illegitimate baby. She lost her husband in World War II.

"If you are born as a dime you will never become a quarter" was Ferron's mother's aphorism. Her family were prim, Catholic conservatives who had no use for the rising socialist rabble. They are shown as bickering, hate-filled couples. Harsh wives humiliated husbands about their lack of progress. Bigoted, class-conscious antagonism prevailed. General frustration, malevolent gossip, and insinuations about dubious participations in the Resistance during the Nazi occupation in the early forties permeated the depressing daily life. From her father, a noncom in the East Indies and then a local Dutch railway conductor, Ferron's mother derived a partiality toward uniforms, going through several liaisons with men in uniform, even a taxi owner!

At war's end, five-year-old Ferron was claimed by his maternal grandparents and sporadically by his bitter mother, when not being boarded in marginal schools run by nuns. His emotional solitude and hunger for praise fed his escape in fantasies. His only employment was a dead-end job as reporter for a provincial newspaper, and his only two significant relationships both failed: his wife Andrea left him following a phantom pregnancy; and Esther, the single mother of two, walked out because "I was always ready with a song or melody when silence was a must."

Uninterrupted by chapter divisions and only occasionally broken by double spaces, Ferron's text includes reminiscences, dissections, and reviews of family photos and souvenirs. His language is precise, always polished, with a rich, evocative vocabulary full of popular exclamations and a command of common speech and such authentic idioms as "Iemand de das omdoen" (literally "Pull someone's necktie askew" or "Hurt someone"). Constant brief sentences anchor the morbid memoir, wherein brutal, physical verbs and the Haarlem locale predominate. For relief, the writer exhumes Jakob Lenz, a German poet of the Sturm und Drang era whose frozen body was found one dawn in 1792 on a Moscow avenue (!), or features Ferron's only friend, Metz, "who laughs about everything that occurs. And then writes somber tales about it." Metz likes to test potential material and epigrams for his frequent best sellers on Ferron, who has been forced to take early retirement and now subsists only on a small pension.

De Walsenkoning's probing examination of flawed lives and its eloquent social and political critique call to mind the unceasing pessimism of Celine and the vehement denunciations of the prominent Flemish author Jef Geeraerts: "With memories you do not get far in this world." Ferron produces nothing but memories here. Both he and the book do poorly--or is that his negative point?

Henri Kops Fort Bragg, Ca.