‘Ode to the word of God — or whomever’
Book review of THE RECONCILIATION (R.A. Basart)
By Rob Schouten
(Trouw, 31–05–2016)
Story-less novel shows overwhelming linguistic and visual skills
There’s writers who bring a story, and this story may or may not please you. Then there’s writers who bring both story and style, and often one of these two will be more pleasing to you. And there’s writers with style. R.A. Basart (1946) is a writer with style, matchless, magnificent style. Literary fireworks: each and every sentence in his novel The Reconciliation is a joy to read. However, it doesn’t hold much of a story: Alright, it’s about a conflict between a father, Ini Pardise and his son Tjonny, about teachers who are faced with a project consultant at their school, and about Ini’s wife and Tjonny’s friend Bob Tack (“a name like two quick punches in the stomach”), and about women and girlfriends. As a matter of fact, The Reconciliation abounds with characters, but keeping track of them isn’t of much use. They are not there to tell a story or to head for a plot; they exist to radiate style.
Basart writes scarcely, two poetry collections way back when, the novel “The Last Laugh”, a succès d’estime among fans (myself included) and his debut as a novelist, and now: The Reconciliation, which, according to himself, he worked on for sixteen years. A scarce-writer for literary gourmets. His prose (warning: contains traces of Nabokov) is one big literary game, a showcase filled with winks, quotes, his own findings, flashy one-liners. His heroes and heroines bear remarkable names, corny sometimes: Jude Pardise, or suggestive: Brittle, Broke, Eel Strawtie, Han Gotgiven: no common people. The world of Basart is one of Hieronymus Bosch-like livery, everybody is part of some sort of present-day hallucination.
Take, for example, the scene in which Hans and Petie (who they are, and why they are there is not of the essence; it’s the scene that matters) enter a restaurant: “Seated to the right were an apelike couple (with both of them at least four fingers would have fitted horizontally between nose and lipless mouth) in Tyrolean vests. The woman put a square of meat into her mouth, opened up her vest: a small dog plucked the meat from her pursed lips. At the next table a British with horse teeth. He plunged into his plate, slobbered, grunted, came up growling, his breath faltering. Blew his nose, plunged down again.” Someone who writes like this, doesn’t have to tell a story, the style is his story.
Yet, something does seem about to happen at first. Ini Pardise is a conservative, in amazement about modern manners and language (“win-win situation”), himself using words like “sideward” and “granted” he seems to be the right character in a satire on modern-day language, but before long everyone in this novel appears to be speaking and thinking the way he does, drenched in literary and biblical use of language. These are no actual characters, each and everyone of them a mouthpiece for Basart himself, pouring over us all of his linguistic and visual powers.
This is overwhelming. No matter the subject, be it God or the world’s Evil, a person called Elysée’s dying of colorectal cancer or a hallucinating trip through a corny Chinese-themed hotel along the highway; all of it is drenched in the virtuosic, erudite style of this writer, who sometimes takes his time to describe an everyday scene exhaustively, then again jots down an intensely emotional event without a trace of subtlety. The fun part is the ease with which you recognize it all, the everyday events and most ordinary of people — yet they wear masks all the time, say someone else’s lines and bump across the stage.
The reader has lost the plot completely by now, yet the story drags him breathlessly toward the end and concludes with a protagonist’s stigmata and some sort of visionary art, whilst invoking all of the Saints. Quite religious indeed, and this may well be this book’s “mission”: faith in language, in the Word — of God or whomever, in controlling and elevating the ordinary. Language is the actual main character in this sublime non-story.
For more information about R.A. Basart and THE RECONCILIATION, please visit the Lebowski Agency website.
