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The 6 books that had the most influence on who I am today

Hans de Zwart and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. For this post we agreed to write about the 6 books that had the most influence on who we are today. For each book we include a first read section. You can read Hans’s post with the same title here.

Please, if you ever read a book in your life, and you found this article interesting, sign up to goodreads.com, you can find me and Hans there as well

Reflecting on the title of this post, none of these books actually caused a radical change or severely disrupted the course of my life. Sure is that without these books my current me would have been different. Another certainty is that these books are changing with me. These books shaped me into who I am but at the same time they change themselves as I am the one who values them. I don’t exist without these books and these books don’t exist without me. That kind of symbiotic evolution is what I love about reading. Me and my books; we got each other in a loving stranglehold.

Please note that for the Dutch books I kept the original Dutch title. It feels very strange for me to translate the title to English. Moreover, I don’t believe there are English translations of these works.

1. The Sea Of Fertility - Yukio Mishima
Cheat number 1: The Sea Of Feritility is a tetralogy. The four novels include Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn and The Decay of the Angel. This is Mishima’s Magnum Opus. If I have to summarise this or all of Mishima’s work in one word it would be: decay. Throughout his work Mishima explores the themes of Buddhism, Shinto, nihilism, beauty, post WWII Japan, reincarnation, knowledge and action, truth and suicide. One of his famous quotes is “To know and not to act is no to know” There are so many layers and levels in these four novels that you can just keep reading and re-reading them. Worthy notice is that after the completion of the final work of The Sea Of Fertility, Mishima comitted seppuku, ritual suicide; history is a record of destruction.

First read:
I still clearly remember buying the first two novels of the tetralogy. I was in Jakarta in a mall looking for something to read in the air plane back home. (If you’ve ever been to Indonesia you probably noticed that you hardly see anyone reading a book. I always wondered if there was no one reading books because there are no book shops, or there are no book shops because no one reads.) So I finally found this department store which had a book section. Even an English book section! Well, English book shelf. I never heard of Mishima but judging the back cover it shouldn’t be too bad. After reading one page in the plane it bored the hell out of me. I stopped reading the book and instead watched a Harry Potter movie (Harry Potter movies and body wrecking air plane travels are inextricably connected in my life, having done Harry Potter nor air plane travel any favour). Anyway, the cursed Mishima’s stayed in my book shelf for about 2 years or so until I had absolutely nothing to read any more at home and thus finally gave them another chance. Blessed be that day.

2. Firefly – Haruki Murakami
Firefly is actually a short story and a not novel or a book. Murakami based his later novel Norwegian Wood on this story. Although I truly enjoyed reading Norwegian Wood, I never really liked it as much as Firefly. Firefly has everything that makes a short story really stand out. It’s crisp, it’s got lots of room for interpretation and it’s fragile. How many writers can write fragile stories? Remarkably, this story doesn’t have typical Murakami ingredients like magic-realism or pop-culture references. It’s very focussed on human relationships. For me, this story expresses Japan as Japan really is: the things not said, the things implied, distance, humbleness, to be retreated. Action and consequence.

First read:
On a cold, cold winter night at around 12 o’clock lying in my bed just about to sleep. Reading Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a collection of short stories, I thought “One more paragraph of the next story and then I’ll sleep”. That next story was Firefly. I didn’t put the book down till I finished the story,

3. Een Uitzinnige Liefde – Bob den Uyl
Bob den Uyl is not really a well known writer in Holland. Too bad for the people who never heard of him because he is the funniest Dutch author in my opinion. If you can appreciate ironic, sarcastic observations of the meaninglessness of life, Bob den Uyl is the man. Well, I, for one, based my whole being on ironic, sarcastic observations of the meaninglessness of life. That’s why Bob and me go along pretty well. As a bonus, Bob is fond of biking, just like me. Life is without purpose so why not read one of den Uyl’s collection of short stories. If you’re finished with ‘Een uitzinnige liefde’ try ‘Gods wegen zijn duister en zelden aangenaam’, ‘Vreemde verschijnselen’ or ‘Een zwervend bestaan’ for equal reading pleasure.

First read:
Easy, I picked the oeuvre of Bob den Uyl as my reading list subject for my high school Dutch exams. So I read all his books in 1994/1995. I guess I was one of the few who actually enjoyed reading for his exams.

4. De Man Die Werk Vond -  Herman Brusselmans
Three words: boredom, fear and loneliness. Brusselmans’ best work in my opinion is this early novel of his alter ego Louis Tinner and his days as a librarian in a Brussels Ministry’s library. If you truly still believe life has a purpose, if you still believe there’s a deeper meaning in things, please read this novel and you’ll  be cured for the rest of your life. To top it all of, Brusselmans writes about his misery and pitiful life in a lovely ironic and sarcastic way. Plenty of laughs on the journey to the back cover as well then!

(Did I hear Gerard Reve? Anyone said Reve (‘De Vierde Man’)?)

First read:
Now, there’s a blank in my memory. It feels like I read this book 20 years ago but looking at the publishing date of the edition I got, it can’t be more than 3 or 4 years ago.

5. The Plague – Albert Camus
Of all the philosophers I read or read about until today, Albert Camus stands out as being the closest to my personal thought. The crucial point being that he acknowledges that life in itself is without meaning. Then, if that is true, knowing life is without meaning while still we greatly value it (the absurd paradox of life), why don’t we kill ourselves? That would be the rational consequence to take. However, Camus stated that meaning, though fragile and unstable, can be created through your own actions, interpretations and decisions. I myself love this absurdness of life where meaning is constantly challenged by death and decay. Let it be clear that I am an admirer of the complete works of Camus. In The Plague Camus covers the major themes of exile and separation, solidarity and community. Quoting the English wikipedia entry on Camus: “only by making the choice to fight an irreversible epidemic are people able to create the ever-lacking meaning to a life destined for execution the moment of its creation.”

First read:
Late spring 2006 in Hveragerdi, Iceland. I joined my wife on one of her fieldwork campaigns. Iceland, like Indonesia, is one of the countries which make you think different about life. Add to that a healthy dose of Camus, 160 km of biking through beautiful windy plains, plenty of free time, horrible food and no alcohol and you got your character defining experience.

6. A Feast in the Garden – György Konrád
Konrad is a Hungarian author which I got to know through a tv documentary by Wim Kayzer. Especially the interview with Konrad impressed me a lot so I started reading his novels. I especially like the dualism in Konrad’s work. Quoting (poorly translated by me): “(…) at this moment the duality of everything. Saint and hedonist at the same time. Spontaneity and the beauty of decadence; the attraction of the forbidden.”

First read:
Fall 2004 in Fuji, Japan. One of the enormous pile of books I always drag along on my foreign trips. Fall Japan = late summer Holland; around 20-25 degrees Celsius great food and the most mind twisting country you’ll ever visit. The country actually really suits Konrad’s style of writing. Write and wrong, black and white, plastic and authenticity live right alongside there.

Cheat number 2,3,4,5 and 6: of all the authors mentioned above (including Mishima) I actually love all their work. Reading more than one novel of an author provides new perspectives and insights on previously read work and on his genre as whole. Combine that with your personal growth as a reader and you get a self strenthening spiral.

Bukowski, Deelder, Dostoyevksi, Celine, Verhulst, Lanoye, Selby, Nooteboom,Sartre, Hermans, Mulisch, Pirandello, Kafka,Eco, Slauerhoff, Lucebert, Vlek, Hemmingway, Miller, Proust, Dazai and all the countless others: sorry, I could only pick six…

Poetry is greater than prose

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