Down and out in Rotterdam

Ideas, meaning and a mind in motion

Tag: Bildüngsroman

  • Writing my first novel with NANOWRIMO

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    It is with great joy that I can update this blog with an uplifting post and the news that I am well on my way with writing my first novel (20.000 words and counting) and I couldn’t have done it without ‘nanowrimo’, the national novel writing month event which supports and motivates writers.

    To be honest many work has been done before november started, but it stagnated and it is with nanowrimo backing me that I am finally pushing myself further than I ever did, regularly updating my word count and seeing my novel grow day by day.

    I had an aborted attempt on a novel last year when I discovered nanowrimo for the first time. That time I had an idea for a coming-of-age novel based on actual biographical events during my exploratory years as a undergrad and graduate student in Leiden featuring many of my ex-girlfriends, friends, lost dreams, failures and successes and still remains shelved for a future attempt.

    No, this time my first 50.000 word draft will precede the Leiden years, and it will be more fundamental and dramatic and deal with my years in Israel. Talk – again – about coming of age. It was more falling from grace, or waking up from a pleasant dream after a car crash. Well that’s a bit over dramatic. The words are coming, it’s biography, fiction and non fiction all in one. I had the opportunity of growing up in Israel during the roaring ’90’s, roaring meaning a decade combining hope, peace, assassinations and suicide attacks. These roaring 90’s will provide the background to my personal story and army experiences.

    For now I have no illusion of publishing it. It’s foremost a personal story, but it has an ambitious scope. It starts with a foreword about my Jewish ancestors and their Zionism which led them to leave Europe for Palestine, and an afterword/conclusion about my experience and the future of Zionism in general based on my growing political thoughts about the matter and my experiences post-Israel, ever since I’ve come back to live in Europe, and witnessing Europe changed and ever changing and with it the European views on Israel.

    I discovered a great novel writing tool which has a free 30 day trial period for the nanowrimo period of november, which I will definitely purchase afterwards because it has already been of great help, it’s called ‘Scrivener’. It helped me bring structure into my story, which helps me focus on specific parts of the story I want to have told.

    The writing is keeping the creative juices flowing that much that I felt like posting this update on my blog. I had to take a pause from my novel for a moment seeing I was writing about the murder of Jitzhak Rabin (1 march 1922 – 4 november 1995) which was probably the single biggest tragedy I experienced growing up in those years.

    But writing is always therapeutic and thank god I am writing!

    This novel will be the novel for which I can use my favorite Hemingway quote as an opening motto;

    Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it’s made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.

  • The one perfect novel that might never be written

    degel hadio compericmant copySomeone once said; ‘Everyone has one great novel in them’. I tried to find the origin of this quote on google, but I couldn’t trace it to the original author.

    I tend to agree. Every person living to old age is in a way a succesful survivor against the odds and has a black box full of memories and experiences locked up inside of him. Years of thoughts, insights and reflections can – if succesfully distilled – form a beautiful narrative account and story about what it means to be human and to be alive.

    I would argue that indeed the best literature are those realistic stories about average people leading average lives. Stories and characters with which we can all identify. Emotions of happiness and tragedy we have all felt.

    What changes is the perspective. And we all have our own unique perspective and historical personal narrative. Reading someone else’s unique perspective can be very rewarding.

    This is not to say that I think everybody should be able to publish his story. Indeed I deplore the vast amount of crap books written and published nowadays. Most attempts at distillation are a mess and like badly distilled alcohol, can seriously damage public health.

    I am talking literature here. And publishers and critics should remain critical of what they publish or promote.

    —

    I have often thought about my one perfect novel and the form it should adopt. My favourite literary genre is the coming-of-age novel, or bildungsroman. I like the concept because it offers a very personal and psychological glimpse on the development of characters. My favourite character Always was Holden Caulfield from ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, which to me is the most perfect psychological coming of age novel ever written. Other good examples on my all time list must include ‘A portrait of the Artist as a young man’ by Joyce which is interesting because of Joyce’s struggle with his deeply Catholic upbringing and ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ by Remarque because the main character grows up in the trenches of WWI.

    The one perfect novel I have in mind is also a coming of age novel. But like Roth’s ‘Radetzky march’ it will span a couple of generations. It might be considered a generational coming of age novel. It will follow the lives of four, maybe five generations of Jews and be partly autobiographical. It will be based on the lives of my Jewish ancestors, my father and finally me. Besides a personal coming of age of the characters, it will also be a coming of age of political Judaïsm or Zionism.

    It will start at the beginning of Zionism with my ancestors in the Ukraine and the Habsburg empire and their struggle, through my grandparents and their pioneering work in Palestine and the building of the state of Israel and it will end with my father and me back in the diaspora with desillusion about the Zionist dream in its purest form.

    That would be a hell of a narrative. But only God knows if I will ever manage to distill it into a work of art.