Willem Elsschot

As part of my Dutch Literature Project, I borrowed a volume by the Flemish writer Willem Elsschot (1882-1960) from the Cofrin Library at University of Wisconsin Green Bay. (All the public universities in Northeast Wisconsin joined to offer a shared library card for community users; it's great having that access.) The volume, published in the Biblioteca Neerlandica series in 1965, is blandly titled Three Novels. The translations are by A. Brotherton.

"Three Novels" might be stretching it a bit; that sounds like a lot of material. The first, Soft Soap, which I just finished, is 139 pages, which certainly qualifies as a compact novel; the second, The Leg, is 57 pages, and the third, Will-o'-the-Wisp, is 40 pages, so those are at most novellas or long short stories. As I have noted in my prior excursions into Dutch literature, Soft Soap doesn't read in the least like a conventional novel. Oh, it has characters, and a theme, but no real plotting or suspense or the other common characteristics of a "novel." It reads more like a fictional demonstration of a truth -- and a brilliant demonstration at that.

Soft Soap, which shares characters with other productions in the Elsschot fictional universe, is set in the Antwerp business world of the 1920s. It is one of the best fictions about business I've ever read -- I'll pick that subject up in a later post. Elsschot's two "perpetrators," Boorman and Laarmans, "soft soap" (and sometimes near-blackmail) businesses into ordering stacks of what looks like an independent publication but is in fact fully paid for marketing literature. This is not an uncommon practice even today; the book has a decidedly timeless feel in a business sense. Boorman, and Laarmans as his protege, are shrewd operators as salesmen, and as a marketer Boorman is in fact a puffer of genius; he can extemporize copy that sounds great (pure b.s., of course, but that's marketing for you). It is the borderline legitimacy and near humanity of these skunks that makes Soft Soap more complex than an Onion-type satire.

Martin Seymour-Smith in his Guide to Modern World Literature says of Elsschot, "He is an unsensational, sophisticated, parodic, tender realist of genius: a delightful writer, and a major one. Elsschot is full of subtle feeling..." Now that is a lot of adjectives, but it also seems like a completely accurate description after reading Soft Soap. I'll be reading all of Elsschot that exists in English translation.

So the Dutch Literature Project has spawned a sub-project on Willem Elsschot; and Soft Soap also falls squarely in my Business Fiction Project. This is an entirely characteristic progression for me. As Yogi Berra said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it!" I interpret that to mean, take all of them.