The Evenings

Gerard Reve · 1923–2006 · Netherlands

Originally De avonden (Dutch)

Why it matters

Bored office clerk Frits van Egters drifts through ten aimless December evenings of morbid jokes and quiet dread, waiting for a life that refuses to start. Reve's postwar debut, voted the best Dutch novel of the century, made banality itself a subject worth this much precision.

At a glance

Plain, deadpan prose; the challenge is tonal: reading dread inside comic banality.