Vonne van der Meer
Sunday Evening (Zondagavond)
The little frictions in everyday life
Vonne van der Meer is clever at revealing the little frictions within everyday human intercourse and this places her at a lonely altitude in the Dutch-speaking world. Zondagavond (Sunday Evening) is more plot-driven that her other novels but it too involves a secret that a man has borne within him for far too long. It is an intelligent, subtle novel.
Robert Blauwhuis, seventy-two years old and for some years a widower, is visited twice a week, on Sunday evenings by his daughter Frederieke and on Wednesdays by Mila, a woman whose life he saved during the war when she was a baby. Frederieke and Mila they never come at the same time, since they consider themselves rivals. The more Robert senses that his end is approaching, the more he wants to free himself of a huge burden, a lie he has been ashamed of all his life. On this particular Sunday evening that point must be reached, and it is indeed reached, but not in the way he expects.
Van der Meer recounts the dramas of at least three lives. In using different narrative perspectives, she is able to make the reader feel her characters’ unexpressed mutual expectations and growing misunderstandings in a way that is dramatic yet understated. Zondagavond is about human behaviour, which in practice always turns out to be lesser than in the life of dreams, and about how we reconcile ourselves to this fact. His ‘daughters’ will have to forgive him, but Robert too will have at last to become kinder to himself. His inner conflict is fought out as he lies in a coma, with Mila and Frederieke on either side of his sickbed. (‘If hell exists, then it’s not a raging fire but the hiss of voices saying all kinds of things about you.’) Van der Meer writes subtly and sympathetically about the ghastly situation.
In her novels Van der Meer takes her characters on a journey, during which they search for the fulfilment of their dreams. Ultimately she teaches them humility. Her moral is always digestible, since it is wrapped in flowing and meticulous prose and in seemingly gossamer-light stories.
Publisher
Contact
Keizersgracht 205
NL - 1016 DS Amsterdam
TEL. +31 20 535 25 35
FAX +31 20 535 25 49
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.uitgeverijcontact.nl
Publishing details
Zondagavond (2009, 168 pp)
Biography
Vonne van der Meer (b. 1952) made her breakthrough to a wide readership with Eilandgasten (Island Guests, 1999), a novel in stories about the problems and ethical choices of visitors to the guesthouse Duinroos on the island of Vlieland in the Wadden Sea. The sequels De avondboot (The Evening Boat, 2001) and Laatste seizoen (Final Season, 2003) were also much in demand. Since her debut with Het limonadegevoel en andere verhalen (The Lemonade Feeling and Other Stories, 1985) she has been associated with sensual portrayals of female fantasies and secrets, highlights being the novel Een warme rug (A Warm Back, 1987) and the story collection Nachtgoed (Nightwear, 1993), but as the years have gone by her work has acquired a more moralizing, humanist accent, as also in the novels Ik verbind u door (I’ll Put You Through, 2004) and Take 7 (2007). She defended this shift in subject matter in an interview by saying, ‘We all get older.’
Website: www.vonnevandermeer.nl
Quotes
A sophisticated novel by Vonne van der Meer about belief, unbelief and the search for meaning. […] Vonne van der Meer is at her best in documenting the doubt that seizes people when they need to make sense of something that is happening to them.
NRC Handelsblad
A plea for indeterminacy, for the leaving open of possibilities.
de Volkskrant
Vonne van der Meer traces the lines of her plot steadily and appositely. Her keen observations make you understand her characters’ behaviour and inner struggles.
De Morgen