(This article is the afterword to "The Fox Comes at Night" by Yilin Publishing House, which is published with the permission of the publishing house)
Seth Nottebohm
As a young man, he was thin, with a typical Dutch narrow face, soft and curved hair, thick black eyebrows, and a firm nose at a 45-degree angle. This is a black-and-white photograph of him when he was young. He was tilting his head sideways, holding a pen, hovering over a wide white printed stamp, the suit was dark, snow-white shirt, and a tie with many small diamond patterns, which could be light yellow or pale gold.
As can be seen from the few photos after middle age, this face has become loose and stretched. What has not changed is that he likes to tilt his head sideways, his eyebrows are slightly raised, and his eyes are calm and distant. No matter how indifferent his expression was, he seemed to have a dignified and tolerant pride in his bones, and corresponding to this was a meaningful look. Only with friends, such as Hugo Klaus, or Umberto Echo, does he smile affectionately.
My limited impression of Nottboum was actually aroused by Hugo Klaus. In August 2020, after reading the thick book "Sorrows of Belgium", I read the conversation that Nottboum completed with Hugo Klaus back home. The old friends roamed the small Belgian town, tracing past memories, interpreting the relationship between fiction and reality, and showing each other's literary resonance and depth of friendship. As I followed in their footsteps and wandered in their eyes, I was also recalling memories related to Nottebohm. Since the publication of his first collection of poems in 1956, the writer, born in The Hague, the Netherlands in 1933, continues to write today. I don't know exactly how many works he wrote, but I have long read two novels that have been translated into Chinese ("All Souls" and "Rituals") and three travelogues ("The Wanderer's Inn", "The Spanish Star Road", "The Road to Berlin"). After reading "The Fox is Coming at Night" this time, I seem to have re-acquainted with this contemporary Dutch literary figure.
If I'm not mistaken, A lot of time must have been spent roaming around in Nottboum's long life. This is not only because he wrote those travelogue masterpieces, in the process of reading "The Fox in the Night", I found that most of the main characters in it are Dutch people living in foreign countries, and when he writes these characters, no matter how they present their fate, they will give them a certain temperament that can only be found in the case of foreign life, especially when you see him describe those exotic objects with concise and poetic brushstrokes, you can even feel their existence. Not only did the Dutch indulge in the state of life in a floating foreign country, but it also strongly attracted his enthusiasm and footsteps.
I have not read his poems, but I have no doubt that he is a good poet. In the course of reading The Fox Comes at Night, I learned that it is almost impossible for a man who can write a novel in such a subtle and layered way that he is not good at writing poetry. In almost every novel, you can pick out a few fragments at random, and the branches are good poems.
However, this is still superficial. Deeper down, he has the ability to make the writing of the novel reveal a fascinating subtle poetry from time to time. This is not an easy task.
Floating life with soul
So, what kind of work is "The Fox Comes in the Night"?
It consists of seven novels, because Paula I and Paula II are actually one, but I don't think of it as a collection of short stories in general, but rather as a novel. Now, I'll give a brief overview of these novels before explaining why they end up being a work of fiction.
An old man, coming to Venice, recalls the maidens he met here many years ago, and they ignited a brief passion and then went their separate ways. Later, she got married and had children, divorced and studied painting, and then came across his art reviews and found that the painter he commented on was her favorite. He went to America to visit her, for the end. Then she died. His memories are filled with sorrow and despair. (Gondola)
A woodcut artist, afraid of winter, afraid of the cold climate, because of the black-guted character. He loves stormy weather. At the beach, he and his lover witness an unexpected tragedy: a woman who likes to shoot lightning argues with her boyfriend who hates her doing it, and then he walks to the beach with a wine glass and is killed by lightning. On his way home, the artist sawed off the roots of a tree that had been blown down by the wind and brought it home. (Thunderstorm)
The Fox Comes in the Night, by Seth Nottbohm (The Netherlands), translated by Du Dong, Edition: October 2021
An old man, imagining an old photograph. Remember Heinz, the Honorary Vice-Consul of the Netherlands in a small seaside town in Italy, a charming man with a smile on his face, how he slowly tossed himself to death because of the death of a mysterious and beautiful woman. (Heinz)
An old woman, in solitude, reminisces about the admiral she loved, the husband of her best friend. When the girlfriend was dying, they told her that they would be together. After his death, the only thing that could bring her some kind of temporary companionship was the old waiter in the restaurant. He didn't speak English well, and she wasn't good at Spanish. He was a man cursed by fate to steal her money. What puzzled her was the way her good friend Annabella looked indifferent when she heard that they would be together. ("September End")
A female illustrator, the late lover was doing finance. He was afraid of the night, afraid of the evening, and afraid of the sun. They all enjoy living in foreign countries. In their lives, there have been several turtles. Turtles eat hibiscus petals that fall to the ground. She loves hibiscus the most, blooming bright flowers every day and falling at dusk. She painted turtles, wrote their stories, and named them Christians. She had hated him. They were in love for three years, and not long after they broke up, he died. For her, he died three times: left, died, and was forgotten by her. (The Last Afternoon)
A man lives in a zen-like penthouse, sitting in a chair he has only, facing the blank walls, and missing the late Paula. More than four decades ago, she was on the cover of Vogue magazine and in newspapers for her participation in sit-in demonstrations, street assaults and love parties. She smoked, drank heavily, and was loved by everyone. He and his friends are old. He fondly recalled everything related to her, but her image was vague. His understanding of her inner world was concrete and vague. (Paula I)
His memories failed to penetrate her heart, but Paula's ghost heard his call and thought it was a tacit understanding. She describes how death happens differently from what she imagined, and reveals that he doesn't need a partner and is always distracted and nihilistic. And he didn't know anything about her state. She loved him. She talks about relationships between the sexes that don't have love but have passion. He was afraid of the dark. She knew that the fox was always at his side. No one knew her. Everything is 'fleeting.' Gone as we are'. (Paula II)
A young woman, in stormy weather, went to the cape of the island. No one knew what she was looking for there. She herself didn't know how to explain it. She went to dance, using the wind as a dance partner, and she wanted to blend in with the intoxicating sea of rage, roaring at the sea, fighting anger with anger. But this happiness cannot be shared with others. She believed that she was rational and had a tacit understanding with the storm, the sea, and this cape. ("The Cape of the Sea")
Now, closing the book, what remains in my mind is the turbulent sea. Then there are the people and things that flicker and float. The dark and stirring sea is the background of those characters and their stage.
Their memories are like scenes on the stage, always penetrating and haunting with similar atmospheres. Although they lived either in a small seaside town or on an island, either in Italy, or in Spain, and occasionally in Amsterdam, reminiscing about distant coastal towns or islands, spatial differences did not prevent them from eventually producing such a novel.
They probe the same problems from different angles through different character fates and environmental backgrounds. No matter how their fate is revealed, it actually implies a similar state of life, that is, floating. This is a subject that Nortbohm has always fascinated. Including Arthur in "All Souls' Day" and Ini in "Ritual", in fact, they have lived a similar floating life. The only constant is the gentle flick of the sea on the docks, and everything else can be changed, which is a prop to decorate your memory.
Fundamentally, it is their hearts, their souls, that are always floating and helpless. Even, for them, the whole world is floating, in the turbulent sea, and they may be just floating shadows. They strive to exist in their own way, but they are always rootless. At the twilight of their lives, they try to rediscover and grasp something in the abyss of memory, only to witness once again in the process of trying to reconstruct the state of continuous disintegration of the personal world. In their memories, they all seem to want to prove that they really loved, but what they show is endless confusion and doubt, as well as unspeakable pain: when you walk in the brilliant sun, you will be surprised to find that everything about life and its suffering are just walking on the wall covered with pointed glass.
When life crashes to the ground, look at what it looks like
In fact, they also know that all their memories can reach is nothing more than a ruined existence. At the same time, for them, perhaps ruins also mean the unexpected appearance of some true essence after all external things have been worn away by time. They reminisce to end a past, even though 'the end is not the same as the end'. Perhaps, for them, the end is to allow the past to re-exist in some other way, never to fade away, even at the end of their lives. Moreover, at the twilight of life, even sorrow will become precious.
They are all reminiscing about decades ago. However, they are more puzzled and confused than ever. Their memories allow us to see the abyss, generated by various misunderstandings and illusions between people, especially those who love each other. What they have tried so hard in their memories seems to have finally reached the abyss, not the answer. Ultimately, all they tried to do was, as Montalet's poem puts it: 'When life crashes to the ground, look at what it looks like.' ‛
Writers like to reminisce in their later years, and they touch more on the issues of love and death, and Nottebohm is no exception. The seven works in this novel all revolve around love and death in remembrance. Those characters are in their twilight years, and the people they have tried to recall are long gone. As their memories have decayed, their memories have become more and more difficult, and the only motivation comes from the deceased who are the knots in their hearts. People are always passionate and imaginative when they are young, and it is easy to self-righteously equate immersion in emotional relationships with knowing everything, completely blind to the blindness in them. Before reaching the end of life, looking back at everything that has been blurred on the long road, in addition to finding that all kinds of confusion is still difficult to solve, you will suddenly find that even if it is confused, it is extremely precious, like eternal stars, shining charmingly in the distant past. And even those memories related to love are set against the background of death, and the so-called appearance of life is, to a large extent, outlined by those who have been in love moments.
In Gondola, the hero spends his early years in Venice fascinated by a girl from the United States with an Italian name. The girl who laughed and called herself a witch and liked to 'talk at length about magic and witchcraft' in her letters, the girl who would 'carry a distinct, beastly arrogance' even when she was asleep, captured him simply with 'how her blue-gray eyes shone in the night'. She gave him the shortest and most intense love experience in his life, and he could not let go of it for the rest of his life. She came down like a little fairy and occupied his heart. Then she left, became a woman, got married and had children, then divorced and engaged in art, and almost ran out of the house. But for him, she was like a bright light that accidentally shone into his life, and then left him with a dark night. He had thought that the American reunion before her death would put an end to the state of the night, but he did not expect that her later death would push the night to the extreme.
"It's unbearable that some people have disappeared from your life. You have to have a hundred times as much life unfolding at the same time to make sense. ”
It can be said that it is extremely difficult to face. "Death is a gift of nature, but it often brings pain like the abyss, and you are eager to fall into the abyss yourself, surrendering to the bleakness and true surrender of the mystery of death." 」 Perhaps, through a novel such a novel, Nottbohm tries to suggest to us that true love, like death, is essentially ultimate.
In the subsequent "Thunderstorm", Nottboum shows us the incomprehensible and even misunderstood side of lovers, and how death illuminates the truth with a fortuitous blow, while at the same time following the people who love each other like shadows. The woodcut artist's fear of winter and cold weather due to his dark and daring personality is actually only superficial, and in essence, he is always sensitive to the existence of death and the approaching at any time. He couldn't understand that his girlfriend could be unaffected by environmental changes and focus on things that he didn't think were interesting. Her health and stability were exactly the balance he needed, like an anchor, to help him avoid being swallowed up by the dark and turbulent sea. The beautiful woman who is addicted to shooting lightning and the boyfriend who is in bad mood are like an enlarged image projection of the state of the artist's relationship with his girlfriend. The fact that the man walked to the beach in exasperation and was accidentally struck by lightning and died was a symbol, and it was the emotionally stable beauty who caused this tragic consequence. But he also knew that it was just an accident, that the man who had been struck by lightning, the roadside tree that had been uprooted by the wind, was essentially the same fate. It was a sudden burst of the power of death. The reason why he sawed off the behemoth of Medusa's head and took it home to take it in was not so much for artistic necessity as for trying to imply that doom was not always in control. Perhaps, he really wanted to try to survive, to be a survivor, on the verge of death. But, it's just maybe. Don't burn it, he said. Let it dry and dry. In the morning light, she could see what the piece of wood would eventually look like. It seems that such a sentence has given some hint to the future of the lovers, and no one can escape their fate.
In a sense, Heinz is like a strong variation of Gondola and Thunderstorm. If the latter two look a bit like a violin solo, the former is clearly more like an imposing piano concerto, about desperate love and personal secrets. The 'superhuman' woman who has never appeared in the novel, who is "as bright as spring", Ariel, is the core of the secret. Perhaps, it was Heinz's overly fanatical love for her that accidentally led to her death. But who knows? Her epitaph reads: 'Ariel van der Lutte, life is only in the beard, originally silent, 1940-1962.' This passage itself is a mystery.
Wanderer's Inn, by Seth Nottbohm (The Netherlands), translated by Du Dong, edition: Yilin Press, October 2021
When the object of love dies, this fanatical love is like an uncontrollable force turning to the lover himself, and in this way, Heinz spends the rest of his life tossing his originally dashing image like Clark Gable all the way to bloated, unbearable to look at, and tossed to death. No one knows what it's all about. Intense love makes people what they are, and it also deprives people of everything. Like death, this love will make fate reveal its true colors in an instant.
Love and death are the ultimate secrets of life. In contrast, the narrator's always patient and calm reminiscence, although it is also a secret in itself, is still somewhat insignificant. Perhaps, the reason is not complicated, but he has never reached that state of intense love in his whole life, neither loved nor destroyed by love. As suggested earlier in the novel's dialogue in Ive Compton-Burnett's The Last and The Beginning, the key word in his life may be "emptiness" and "meaninglessness." And it's better to accept the fact that 'if there is nothing in the first place, we don't have to pretend to have something'.
In contrast, "The End of September" and "The Last Afternoon" look more like an episode. The former is a story of gaining and gaining nothing, writing about the desolation and remembrance of Susie's lonely evening scene. When her friend Annabella was dying, she and her husband, Lieutenant Admiral, confessed to the dying woman that they would be together. What she never understood was why Annabella didn't care about it. Perhaps, what she should understand but failed to understand is that at the time of death, people may tolerate everything. Perhaps, she could understand that what was more unbearable than the loss of love and death was the torment of waiting for death to come in loneliness, and of course, this torment could also make people tolerate everything. "The Last Afternoon" is about hate. The premise of hate is still because of love and incomprehension. The female illustrator's hatred for the lover she had been in love with for several years was inexhaustible, not so much because of the love affair, but because he had thrown her into an incomprehensible dazed situation. Because of the hate, she let him die three times, the last time was forgetting. But will she really forget? It is likely that he will live forever in her heart, and the background is a mystery of mutual incomprehension. Who's to say that the revenge she gave him wasn't the cause of his death? Maybe she just wanted to have him completely, but it turned out to ruin everything.
Illustration of the original version of the Nottbohm novel
If the three movements of "Gondola", "Thunderstorm" and "Heinz" are all narratives unfolded from a male perspective, while "The End of September" and "The Last Afternoon" are narratives from a female perspective, then in "Paula I" and "Paula II", it is a duet narrative through the two perspectives of men and women, like a question and an answer. The title of "The Fox Comes in the Night" is from "Paula II". The correspondence between these two pieces, and the double metaphor of the fox imagery: the mysterious spontaneous freedom and death, certainly has a deep meaning in Nottboum. On the one hand, he tries to hint at the misunderstandings and delusions between men and women in love relations through these two closely related novels; on the other hand, he seems to want to show the fact that even if there are so many misunderstandings and delusions caused by the deep gap caused by love, love, after all, it is as illusory as life itself and all phenomena related to life, like illusions. Here, it seems that we can realize that Paula, as the ghost of Paula, completes the mission of revealing the secret given to her by the author. At the end of the novel, her final farewell to him has a vague taste of Zen public case.
"The Horn of the Sea", which appears at the end of the entire novel, is more like a prose poem than a novel. It is full of symbolism, like a poetic representation of Nottebohm's view of femininity, or his spiritual tribute to women. All the secrets of life and spirit of the female characters who have appeared in other novels seem to be revealed through this one. She is one woman and all women. The cape is the tipping point between the earth and the ocean, the place where the smooth everyday world and the turbulent and abnormal world are divided and intersected, and the point of dialogue between the female life and spiritual power and the mysterious natural might. Here she is showing the dance of life, such a strong state of being of life and spirit, she is not talking, but roaring, facing the turbulent and dangerous abyss of the sea, she wants to 'merge into this intoxicating rage'.
I'm here for this:
For the sake of roaring.
I plucked up courage—me
Knowing that no one here can see me,
Hear me — I go to the sea
Roar, fight back,
At first I was skeptical,
Can't hear your own voice, but then
My roar is getting louder,
Fight anger with anger.
I screamed like a hundred seagulls,
I shouted to the drowning sailors,
Make a call, and they will respond,
I know that's what I crave.
Longing to get lost in this undulating rhythm,
But I know it's impossible, dance
That concludes, I'm going to walk heavily
Walking back, the storm roared,
Chasing me, dragging me down tiredly.
I have lost the North,
We say so at this point, lost
Kuramontana Wind. That's tantamount to saying you
Has lost his mind, of course,
For me, that's not right.
My sanity is not less.
I am happy, but there is no one to share with me.
I had to wait until the storm and the sea again
Summon me to the cape,
This is our tacit understanding.
After the ends of the novel are branched out, they are notthebohm's hymns for the power of the women's spiritual will. Come to think of it, isn't the thought of the woman named Rosetta who appears in Thunderstorm similar to this state: 'Now he is like a lone boat drifting haphazardly in the dark sea.' She knew that her calmness had annoyed him even more, and she knew that in the face of his self-proclaimed black guts, only his own indifference and stoicism could sustain him in the face of the darker season. The best thing to do with this is to head head-on. It was her love, it was her way of loving. And the man named Rudolf, the woodcut artist, although he would also say, 'What I want is the uninhibited force of nature', but the state he specifically shows is actually much more fragile and powerless. Perhaps like many men in this novel, he either thinks ironically, 'How wonderful life is, and should be decorated again and again', or 'I want an explanation, but I can't find it'. Paula saw this very thoroughly, or about men: "You never understood our relationship. You believed the lie I told. Women are good at lying, while men are good at being cheated, ha! To remain with you means that I have to endure your usual distractions. It's too painful. So for so many years, you were still alone, and I could see it at a glance. You exist in the world, you don't need a partner at all, and living with you would be a disaster, and I can survive this disaster, and you can't. You live so that the mind is not here, or rather, your heart is here, and man is no longer here. ”
The Narrative Art of Memory, Photograph or Nottboum Knoweboum understands the nature of memory and the reconstructive properties of memory. He obviously knows that the so-called memory and recall are actually based on the 'present', and it can even be said that people are based on the 'present' to complete the continuous reconstruction of memory. As far as memory and recollection are concerned, photography is not so much evidence of presence as it reveals the fractured, disorderly and mutilated nature of memory itself in a seemingly ordinary but unusually abrupt way. That's why he says, 'In a good story,' the 'present' is neitherwhere to be found, nor to be found. In the photograph, 'absence' is important, and as for how important it is, it cannot be put into words. I mean, if you never knew the person in the photo, you couldn't possibly know who was absent, and that's the point. ‛
For a writer like Nottbohm, even a seemingly ordinary photograph is enough to generate a scene of multiple dramas that are delicate and meaningful. The way he created the drama is not deduced according to the usual logic, but like a slice experiment, the different aspects of each character, from the inside to the outside, from shallow to deep, from concrete to subtle, are layered in a translucent state, and although there are some gaps between each piece, it is precisely because of this that the so-called drama has a space for continuous flow generation. Of course, it is easy to misunderstand this way, as if those slices still have their static side, just like the photo itself, but in fact, all of this is flowing, just like the river, clear and turbid, rolling forward, and the narrator in it is swimming in it, diving and floating, the generation and change of each narrative level, it seems to be just the transformation of ups and downs, only careful readers can truly appreciate the light and dark and turbulence of the river.
In Nottbohm's writing, even the dialogue is clearly a bit like monologues—alternate monologues. Qualitatively, these seemingly monologue dialogues and the flow of consciousness, as well as the subtle flow and change of scenes and details, actually have no clear boundaries, and this seems to be the narrative effect he is pursuing. In the face of this world, whether fictional or real, only in such an effect can the narrative be truly integrated, in addition to immersing people in it, there is no need for any meaningful distinction, what is true and what is illusory? There is no need to distinguish at all, and in the end there will be no such boundaries.
Every time you suddenly look up from This novel by Nottebohm and think about everything that happens and unfolds in the novel, what comes to mind besides love, death, and fate? You know, there can be no complete and clear story, no final revelation of those secrets, and even if you gaze with extraordinary concentration and acumen how the fate of those floating in a foreign country reveals the truth, it is like facing the stirring sea in the night alone, you can feel the rushing breath, you can smell the smell of climate change, you can realize how much it resembles the metaphor of man's inner world and fate, you can feel it, but you can never explain it all. And these may be the essential characteristics of the narrative art of Nottboum's novels.
"Is this the end? Of course not, this is real life, no clues and no plot. ”
Written by | Zhao Song
Edit | Miyako
Introduction Proofreading | Zhao Lin