This Cannonball Read is largely useless: neither of these books have been translated into English and since most of you fine folk don’t speak Dutch, there’s not really any chance for you to read them. Not that there’s much reason you should. Anyway, here’s my foray into Kanonskogel Lezen – the Dutch Edition.
First up is Arthur Japin’s Het Stravinskyspel (The Stravinsky Game). In it, we meet Cody, a boy on the cusp of adulthood. Cody lives in LA and has been moderately successful as a child actor, but now that he’s ageing the jobs aren’t coming in anymore. Cody doesn’t miss the world of acting but is lost as to what to do with his life, so when his parents introduce him to their new neighbours, he strikes up a connection with their studious daughter Sue. Years later, we join Cody as he travels to Sarajevo; it’s 1993, and the city is under siege. There, he joins his friend Sue – now Susan Sontag – as she tries against all odds to put on a production of Waiting for Godot in the war-torn city.
The subject of the novel – Susan Sontag – is a home match for Japin, as his partner is Sontag’s biographer. That makes it all the more regrettable that Japin never really seems to grasp his subject. As a teenager, Sontag is little more than a vessel that eagerly rakes in knowledge, an admirer of the intelligentsia with no patience for the great unwashed. Sitting outside the LA home of the composer Stravinsky, she and Cody play a game: how many years of your life would you sacrifice for a piece of art, or a good deed? But their conversations are little more than fawning over Thomas Mann (whom they visit) and bemoaning the fact that they weren’t alive when Stravinsky’s Sacre Du Printemps premiered, so that they could laugh at the people who didn’t get it (and completely missing the point that they, too, fawn over artists from well before their time and seem to have little patience for their own contemporaries). Even as an adult Sontag is never really portrayed well; her notoriously prickly personality is never anything other than manic or annoying. Even her compassion seems performative. Sontag no doubt did a lot of good in the city of Sarajevo, but Japin never really manages to make her come to life. Ironically the only time the novel really engaged me was when the attention was away from the main characters; describing Cody and Sontag’s visits to the homes of the actors in their play as they struggle for survival, and telling the all too familiar story of Cody’ s boyfriend Eli, succumbing to AIDS in the early nineties.
The book is also incredibly pretentious, so even though I don’t usually like reading two books at the same time I was happy to alternate this one with my other read of these past weeks, Hilde Veeren’s Maretak (Mistletoe). It’s as uncomplicated as Het Stravinskyspel is pretentious. The plot is downright ridiculous: Molly, a twenty-eight year old Dutch woman, has found a Fabergé egg at a thrift store (yes, really) and has fallen head over heels in love with the man who has helped her sell it. With a couple of million in the bank, Molly can do what she wants and so she’s bought a seaside cottage in a quaint, English village and spends her money on online shopping while she waits for her boyfriend James to propose. Meanwhile, she fights and makes up with her best friend Celine, hangs out with her local friends in pub quizzes and does some very drunk impulse purchasing. There’s a trip to Kleinfeld in New York (because the thing with the Fabergé egg isn’t subtle enough and this book is basically TLC: The Novel); Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs show up (I assume neither actor is aware of the fact that they’re in this novel); Molly does a lot of faceplanting in the mud in various outfits and there’s an ex named Atlatticus because the author couldn’t choose between Atlas and Atticus and went with the stupidest option. It’s delightfully dumb.
This isn’t a good book on any plane. Even as escapism, it barely works because that is just not how the world works, how people work, and it leaves the reader feeling incredulous. Problems that arise quickly solve themselves. Molly ends up in a big fight with Celine while they’re in New York over something trivial; when she gets to their hotel room, she finds that all of Celine’s things are gone and Celine appears to have vanished from the face of the earth, only to call Molly back a week or so later as if nothing had happened, saying she’d been over the whole thing for days now. The pining ex and the Other Hot Guy take themselves out of the equation. The one truly tragic thing to happen in the novel is quickly brushed aside with a cheerful “as long as we’ve got each other” (the entire town clapped. No, they really do). The English major in me could spend hours listing the ways in which this is a badly written novel.
And yet.
This isn’t my normal fare, but I’ve had issues focusing on more complicated matters and this book was honestly just what I needed. It made me feel incredulous with every ridiculous situation that Molly puts herself in (Molly, as you may have guessed, has the IQ of a box of cat litter), but it’s just so relentlessly cheerful and hopeful that I quite liked it in spite of its total lack of literary merit. Perhaps it does work as escapism.
This is part two in a three-part series and I haven’t read parts one and three. I doubt I will; I’m not sure how much more of Molly’s harebrained antics I can take. But as a quick and easy read to get my mind off the state of the world, it was pretty okay.