By Kohinoor Dasgupta
The Republic by Joost de Vries, translated from the Dutch by Jane Hedley-Prôle, was published by Other Press, New York, in 2019. The novel was originally published in 2013 as De republick by Uitgeverij Prometheus, Amsterdam.
The dominant figure in the novel is Josip Brik, whose sudden death is like the end of a long-running, tremendously popular show. While the show ran, everyone watched. When it is over, everyone is instantly over it.
Superficially, fatigue settles in as soon as obituaries have appeared in the major European and American publications. However, Brik’s work is not going to go away. "Hitler Studies" is a growing area. Engaging writer, charismatic speaker, Brik drew students like the Pied Piper and had a fan following among wealthy donors. If historians were bothered by his carelessness with facts, their protests did not reach the Brik faithful. There was no denying his multi-disciplinary, multi-lingual knowledge. Trained psychoanalyst, pop philosopher, TV historian, Brik was a pop culture icon. It is up to the readers of The Republic to mull over whether Brik was a documenter of patterns of moral desiccation or whether he played a role in allowing neo-Nazis to make a comeback pretending to be harmless faddists and researchers. Of course, Brik's most popular book, The Red Machine, or Why Things Cost Money (2005) warned against a lack of vigilance and energy in society, as monsters spawn in shallow waters. The narrator of the novel, Friso de Vos, editor-in-chief of The Sleepwalker, Journal of Hitler Studies, Since 1991 (a publication co-founded by Brik), is unwilling to evaluate Brik's influence. He still sees Brik in the mirror.
Brik is right up there with "the late Jack Gladney” as a "Hitler studies” pioneer. Yes, Jack Gladney of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, the novel that won in the Fiction category of the National Book Awards of 1985 and was made into a movie, directed by Noah Baumbach, in 2022. Joost de Vries launches his satirical novel with this quotation from White Noise (along with another brilliant one from David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp):
"I understand the music, I understand the movies, I even see how comic books can tell us things. But there are full professors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes.”
At the time of his death, Brik was a visiting professor at Cornell University. Friso met Brik by chance at Utrecht, when Brik was a visiting professor at the University of Groningen. The young man owes his appointment to Brik. His girlfriend Pippa, a well-paid art restorer, also got a footing in the States thanks to jobs sent her way by Cornell’s Art department. Both Friso and Pippa adored Brik and gladly helped him whenever he had a request, like looking after two schnauzers, and even intuited his tacit requests. Brik lived alone and traveled constantly.
Brik died in Amsterdam. At the time, Friso was in Chile reporting for The Sleepwalker, an assignment pushed by Brik. Moreover, Friso fell sick in Chile. He could not attend Brik’s funeral. Pippa did.
Though Brik never leaves the novel, the action starts when Friso has recovered and is back in the States. Catching up with obits and such, he is astonished to find out that another young man, Dutch like himself, has usurped his exalted position as Brik’s friend and aide! The world has forgotten Friso, and this pretender, Philip de Vries, is hogging the limelight as Brik’s favorite student. Friso considers himself an authority on Brik. He parses the man's comments on Brik's philosophy. He is frustrated by de Vries' flippant remarks regarding the great man.
The scene then shifts to Vienna, where Friso is scheduled to take part in a panel discussion with the same de Vries during a Hitler Studies conference. Taking advantage of their physical resemblance and anonymity, Friso starts pretending that he is Philip de Vries and does everything he can to tar the stranger. Carrying on with the charade has consequences. The smug Editor-in-Chief of The Sleepwalker learns a few unattractive things about himself in Vienna. Who is he when he is "Philip de Vries”? Not the real Friso? Feeling orphaned by Friso's accidental death, incensed by what he perceives as the theft of his identity, for a couple of days and nights in Vienna Friso abandons the norms of responsible, adult behavior. He seems to be on autopilot, sleepwalking. He is comical, petty, slick. The diligent editor who carefully maintained the serious, academic tone in The Sleepwalker is suppressed. The man who spends forty hours a week reading articles related to Hitler is stricken when his blond good looks and manner are enough to gain entry into a secret basement. He cannot bear the sight of Nazi artifacts with discreet price tags on them.
To cope, to survive, to deal with the destructiveness of a culture overrun by fakeness and absurd but dangerous pursuits, Friso makes up a couple of cinematic reels and memories. Brik’s pop philosophy drew on the language of movies. He introduced Friso to several movies. Friso is so confident that he knows Brik’s views on movies backwards, that, towards the beginning of the novel, he judges Philip de Vries’ comments on the topic:
"[Brik] wasn’t preoccupied with human fantasy, but with human imagination. Those are two different things. In his view, films were about reexperiencing the past – that was where their immediacy lay – through the depiction of concrete events. Spielberg’s D-Day landings or Spielberg’s Schindler. First there was the war, then the story about the war. The war was bad, but the story made the war even worse. The difference between the war and the story was colored in by our imagination – with all the consequent blowups, blue and white tints, and concealments that reveal so much about us. That was what it was about, as far as he was concerned. Not about fantasy. Fantasy is Quidditch and the White Tower of Gondor and unicorns galloping under rainbows, and Brik wasn’t interested in unicorns.”
First there was the war, then the story about the war. The war was bad, but the story made the war even worse.”
Think about this. Perhaps Friso does too, in the little shop of Nazi horrors. The "story about the war”, has to be faithfully factual; it is our terrible legacy. The "story” keeps us remembering, generations later, about the horrors of war. How can "the story” make the worst thing worse?
As I said before, Friso, alarmingly, makes up a couple of funerals, in cinematic fashion. Fantasy or imagination? Is this his way of filling in the gaps in his chronicles of love?
Imagination, fantasy or falsification is unnecessary when, right in the beginning of The Republic, Friso recalls one parental routine (and Friso even forgets to be ageist!). A gap, a slight skepticism: why did his father really meet him at the bus station every Friday? Friso's mind had filled in long ago with filial indulgence.
"That Saturday I sat on a bench at the bus station with my jacket on my lap and my shirtsleeves rolled up. The other benches were mainly occupied by retirees, older men and women who were reading the paper or eating ice cream. Others just sat there, with their eyes shut, contentedly warming their bones in the sun. It reminded me of my father, how he’d sit waiting for me when I came back home on Friday afternoons on the long-distance bus. Wearing sunglasses, holding a newspaper. He always claimed he used my return as an excuse to leave work early, and only later did I wonder whether that was really true. I would nestle into the familiar stuffy smell of his car, while he held forth triumphantly about news stories, showing how clued in he was to current events, so much better informed than me, the modern son. He rubbed his knowledge of world affairs in my face, just as he talked endlessly about computers and internet stuff and made far too many references to popular culture. He was so keen to show me he was keeping abreast of the times. Parental pride works two ways.”
Joost de Vries, born in 1983, won the Dutch literary award, the Golden Book-Owl prize, in 2014 for The Republic, his second novel.
The Republic, by Joost de Vries
Translated from the Dutch by Jane Hedley-Prôle;
Published by Other Press, New York, in 2019
Cover design: gray318
Comments