It's so amazing the things you can learn from books--novels that is. Either you simply slip into a story where there are fascinating peripheral details that you soak up like a sponge without even realizing it, or some little tidbit niggles at you until you go off in search of more information. I'm learning all sorts of things reading Dutch Literature. My latest comes courtesy of Dimitri Verhulst's Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill (published in Dutch as Mevrouw Verona daalt de Heuvel af in 2006 and translated into English in 2009 by David Colmer).
I'm not sure where I first came across Verhulst and found this particular book--on a list perhaps. I knew only that it had been translated from Dutch, it was novella length and had been mentioned as being fable-like. And I have to say I thought the cover illustration very appealing, too. When I started reading, however, I found I had to reorient myself and my expectations. Not to the story, but the setting. Of course Dutch authors can write books set in other places just as English speaking authors do. Madame Verona lives on the slopes of a mountain in the tiny village of Oucwègne, which I had imagined in The Netherlands. I'm a very visual reader and I like details and creating an image in my mind of the characters and their environments. Nothing at all unusual so far, only so many of the references to food and places and even names had a decidedly French-sounding slant to them. I was beginning to wonder if I had chosen a book translated from the wrong language for my project.
Dimitri Verhulst does indeed write in Dutch and has won literary awards in The Netherlands, but he was born in Belgium. Should I admit that I thought French was the main language spoken there with Flemish (not really having an idea of what Flemish even sounded like) coming in a close second? Time for a little googling. Flemish actually refers to the people, Flanders being the region (at one time part of The Netherlands) and Flemings mainly speak Dutch. There is actually a larger Dutch-speaking community in Belgium, with the French-speaking community coming in at a little less than half who are known as Walloons and a smaller German-speaking population who are also recognized politically. You'll have to excuse my ethnocentrism (part of why I love reading--learning about the world), but now I know. I like learning these sorts of cultural and geographical things.
It doesn't change the story, which is in its way quite charming, though tinged with melancholy, too. This is indeed a fable-like story, very simple in the telling though touching on topics weighty and significant but with an extremely light touch. It is a meditation on life and death, on love and loyalty, on remembering and on knowing when to let go.
What is it to be so perfectly paired with someone to spend your life, or at least a few meaningful years in utter harmony only to lose them. Madame Verona and her husband Monsieur Potter live together in happiness in a cottage near the forest, a home where they could be both happy and unhappy (this landscape could absorb M. Potter's bouts of melancholy better than any other). They met as students both studying music. He is a composer and she ends up teaching the piano though was a cellist initially.
You know from the start of the story that M. Potter will die young leaving Madame Verona to pass so many more years alone in her cottage going up and down the hill to attend to business in Oucwègne. She is never able to fully give herself over to another lover despite her beauty and the longing of the men in the village for her. So intense is her sadness that she wraps herself in M. Potter's clothes to feel embraced by him and even the wash cannot completely remove the scent of his being. Her favorite thing is to sit in his armchair reading a book, less for the pleasure of reading than being close to him.
She decides to have a cello made in his memory from a tree near their cottage. It's a particular tree that must be used even though it is not the right wood for a cello. Of all the instruments the cello is the closest to the human voice but she must wait to hear it for many years as the making of the instrument must not be rushed. As the cello maker tells her, the wood gives up its fight slowly and it must be left to dry until it is ready. So for twenty years she patiently waits for the wood to rest and when it finally has taken all the time it needs, Madame Verona will come down the hill just one more time.
There is lots of lovely imagery, words so carefully chosen and beautifully constructed in this story of red ringletted hair and forests like cathedrals, of wintry days and of time composting into memory. If the story feels slight (it is a novella), and the characters somewhat standoffish it is only in happenings and not in meaning. It's the truths beyond Madame Verona, it's her actions and love for M. Potter that give the story its elegance.
Now I am spending most of my time with Eline Vere in the hopes of finishing Louis Couperus's classic tale by the end of the long weekend (with brief forays into my Dutch crime/suspense stories). And so caught up in my reading now, I haven't even thought yet which book I will choose next. Somehow that seems worth noting.