The Evenings – Gerard Reve
The Evenings by Gerard Reve / ISBN 9781782273011 / 320-page paperback from Pushkin Press
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The first English translation of a postwar masterpiece.
“Not only a masterpiece but a cornerstone manque of modern European literature… what can I say, in a world of hype, that will put this book where it belongs, in readers’ hands and minds?… Reve’s sparkling collage of acute observation, droll internal monologue and pitch-perfect dialogue keeps the reader breathless right through to the grand finale…huge respect to Pushkin Press.” — Tim Parks, The Guardian
“This book, an important classic in the Netherlands and long, long overdue in English, is as funny as it is peculiar. Reve really deserves more attention in the Anglophone world.” — Lydia Davis
‘I work in an office. I take cards out of a file. Once I have taken them out, I put them back in again. That is it.’
Twenty-three-year-old Frits – office worker, daydreamer, teller of inappropriate jokes – finds life absurd and inexplicable. He lives with his parents, who drive him mad. He has terrible, disturbing dreams of death and destruction. Sometimes he talks to a toy rabbit.
This is the story of ten evenings in Frits’s life at the end of December, as he drinks, smokes, sees friends, aimlessly wanders the gloomy city street and tries to make sense of the minutes, hours and days that stretch before him.
Darkly funny and mesmerising, The Evenings takes the tiny, quotidian triumphs and heartbreaks of our everyday lives and turns them into a work of brilliant wit and profound beauty.
