PhilPaine.com

Van het Reve is con­sid­ered one of the Netherland’s most impor­tant writ­ers, but I have to say this nov­el left a sour taste in my mouth. I just have no sym­pa­thy for writ­ers who iden­tify gay sex­u­al­ity entire­ly with sado-masochism, self-fla­gel­lat­ing guilt, and obses­sions about catholic doc­trine. No mat­ter how lit­er­ary and sophis­ti­cated it is made to sound, it is basi­cally just as sil­ly as teenagers in Okla­homa dress­ing up as goths and drink­ing cat blood, or any oth­er infan­tile behav­iour based on “blas­phemy”. I resent hav­ing gay sex­u­al­ity sta­pled to this stuff ― or any type of sex­u­al­ity, for that mat­ter. I real­ly couldn’t find any inter­est­ing ideas in this nov­el, or any pas­sages that gave me plea­sure, or images that did not seem trite. The “erot­ic” com­po­nent of the book was mere­ly depress­ing and pathet­ic. Per­haps the style has some par­tic­u­lar qual­ity in Dutch that I have no access to, which accounts for its fame. I have no idea why Van het Reve is though so high­ly of. The light­hearted, tol­er­ant and civ­i­lized atti­tude that most Dutch peo­ple have towards sex is the polar oppo­site of all this kind of stuff. Maybe they just find it so strange that they assume it must be sig­nif­i­cant. But in Eng­lish, there are acres of this kind of stuff in print, play­ing on the mor­bid and self-destruc­tive atti­tudes towards sex that pre­vail in much of the Eng­lish-speak­ing world.