The Evenings: A Winter's Tale
SynopsisPlot
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.
Story
About this book
Frits is twenty-three, an office worker who still lives with his parents in Amsterdam. The novel follows ten evenings at the end of December, when the light fails early and the days repeat themselves. He visits friends, drinks, smokes, and wanders gloomy streets, trying to fill hours that stretch ahead of him without shape or obvious purpose.
Very little happens by the standards of plot. Frits tells jokes that land badly, needles his parents over their small habits, and sometimes talks to a toy rabbit. His sleep brings disturbing dreams of death and destruction. The tension comes from his effort to get through each evening, not from any crisis arriving from outside the house.
Gerard Reve published the book in 1947, when he was in his early twenties and the German occupation of the Netherlands had ended only a couple of years before. That background is never the subject, though it shades the cold city and the guarded, circling conversations. The comedy is dry, assembled from repeated routines and close attention to ordinary rooms, meals, and remarks.
