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Rating: All in all, I think I can say I am a decent person.
Oddly enough, I realize that it is rather inelegant to say so about oneself, and I also know that, at times, I too have contributed to the great ocean of iniquity and unpleasantness that painfully surrounds the Globe. However, in short: I honor my father and mother as best I can, I have never advocated for mass exterminations, I do not aspire to hoodwink my neighbor, and I have never worshipped golden calves.
Like every respectable decent person, therefore, I carry with me my load of follies, manias, and idiosyncrasies.
Among those that occur most frequently is the search for fluidity (or rather, what I think fluidity is): when the cloak of obligations, deadlines, and pressures weighs too heavily on my shoulders, I try as soon as possible to carve out some time where I can wander and navigate by sight: sensitive only and only to the immediate stimuli that the day can offer me.
Sometimes it goes well (I remember when I shadowed a beautiful reddish cat that led me straight to a newly opened bar where they tapped a magnificent Belgian double malt beer), other times it goes not so well (I heard on the radio that a particularly favorable day for Sagittarius ascendents was being announced and, fully falling into that astral category, I made the fatal decision to park all day in the city center without paying for the ticket: I also remember that I was quite pissed off at the fine that was sent to me!).
There was a day that, after putting myself in the right state of mind, the signals that came to me could basically be summed up in two words: “Don’t know”. My girlfriend didn’t know where on earth she had thrown the car keys, my boss was oblivious to the workload for the next day, and I myself had no idea how to fix the washing machine drum.
There are people with threatening swords hanging over their heads ready to fall, but that day I went out with a big ZERO above me: I went to the bookstore.
I didn’t feel like doing anything, I didn’t even know why I had rolled in there in the first place. Just as I was about to leave, my gaze lingered on the letter “n” of the shelf, and I found it there: “Amsterdam Stories”. The author, of whom I had never heard, Nescio (from Latin: “I don’t know”), pseudonym of one Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh, a Dutch writer whose production focused mainly in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Well, can you believe it!? It was a revelation! And then: “Life, thank God, has taught me almost nothing”. After reading this quote from the author on the back cover, all doubts were dispelled: I bought the book.
“Amsterdam Stories” is composed of three long stories and six short (some very short) novellas. These are stories (almost) all intertwined with one another (with characters "migrating" from one episode to another) that are animated by the “sentimental education” of young men just over twenty who, in the vivid setting of early twentieth-century Amsterdam, roam fearlessly in search of answers.
Let me clarify one thing right away, Nescio may not know many things, but there's one thing he definitely knows how to do: write.
The central theme of his pages (the eternal urge to rebel against bourgeois obtuseness that has sparked, still sparks, and will always ignite the consciences of young men just "entered" into life) is a very challenging subject: besides lending itself to a dangerous excess of rhetoric, it also risks the overwhelming comparison with the greatest literary masters who have mined this golden seam over the centuries.
It’s no coincidence that I mentioned “Sentimental Education”: the setting of the first two (magnificent) stories of the book, that group of guys who want to conquer the world and feel God on their side, cannot but remind one of Flaubert’s masterpiece.
It must be said, however, that Nescio comes out of it brilliantly: what in Flaubert was immense, immortal, gargantuan (and, at times, a tad too massive), in Nescio is made light, ironic, “micro-tonal” in the dialogues as varied as can be in colors (with cityscapes flooded with light splendidly rendered of the Dutch city).
The stories are suffused with a light but profound music with peaks of poetry reaching the zenith when the boys find themselves alone on the beach at sunset or by remote canals among cows, frogs, and wheat fields. When, in short, the bourgeois world is distant and harmless.
This inherent aversion of the author to the bourgeoisie (note that Grönloh worked all his life for commercial companies and only much later revealed himself to be Nescio) recalls another great master: Guy de Maupassant.
What unites them is a light touch but biting at the same time, a great disdain hidden behind a minimalistic and terse style. But, if in Maupassant the dominant color was black with no possibility of redemption or salvation, in Nescio, perhaps thanks to an inconsistent yet pervasive irony, there is nonetheless a faint light at the end of the tunnel. Faint, weak, intermittent, but nonetheless tangible and present.
To tell the truth, however, not all the stories match the level of the first two (“The Freeloader” and “Young Titans”): there are in the others some redundant and wearying moments, but those I mentioned, in my opinion, are worth the collection and are among the most beautiful coming-of-age stories I have ever read.
Just a couple more words on the initial topic of the review: I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that even my name (here on DeB) is somehow due to my quest for fluidity.
I was on vacation and, half-drunk, I was on the beach listening to “Galactic Supermarket” by the Cosmic Jokers: I had been “eyeing” Debaser for some time and there, sitting on the spot, I decided that I would call myself that way.
Actually, not quite: the coils of alcohol suggested to me that it would be a rather witty and fun idea to add a “c” in the avatar, to give a hint of my real name (which indeed starts with the “c”).
Only when sobriety was regained did I realize how idiotic it was. I had just registered and could very well have fixed my name by creating another account, but in the end, I decided to leave things as they were.
Will it have been right? Will it have been wrong?
“Don’t know.”
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