This article is based on this Dutch article of Martijn Benders
### The Review of Erik Menkveld
In the court documents, I mention a review I wrote in 2006 about Erik Menkveld, who was then an employee at the Van Oorschot publishing house. I did this because Van Oorschot had announced a ‘review competition,’ and I was genuinely curious about the reason behind it—it is quite unusual, after all. At that time, I was living in Istanbul, did not know Menkveld, and had no axes to grind with him or the publishing house. Yesterday, by sheer coincidence, I saw the review pop up again on my Facebook timeline from 2010. I read it again and saw that it was just a normal, competent review that clearly and honestly reflected my opinion of the book:
With the Highest Respect by Erik Menkveld
Three years ago, Van Oorschot published a competition in conjunction with the release of With the Highest Respect, a letters book by poet Erik Menkveld. I was interested and sent the following review after receiving and reading the book:
A while ago, I saw an online call from the Van Oorschot publishing house, eagerly looking for a reviewer for the book With the Highest Respect by poet Erik Menkveld. Really? I thought, are reviewers nowadays such an extinct species that you need to entice them with a book voucher to write about your products? I couldn’t resist emailing at the time; Dutch books are hard to come by here. Such cozy review competitions are a good opportunity for me, as I don’t have a credit card to order books.
Almost a month later, the sweaty postman delivered the review copy to my doorstep, high on a hill in a suburb of Istanbul. Van Oorschot informed me in the accompanying letter that the ‘winning’ review would be published in the Boekenblad and the winner could choose three books from Van Oorschot’s catalog for free. Three books, quite a prize.
Quality reviews were expected, I read. I suspected that Gerbrandy, Schouten, Jaeggi, and Vriezen would also participate, and that there would be a real titanic struggle among all the promising poetry reviewers for those three free books from Van Oorschot. I decided, against all odds, to take up the challenge and opened Erik Menkveld’s book full of good courage.
Menkveld had released a book containing a dozen letters written by him to various famous, now deceased figures from world history. He wrote letters to Buddha and Ezekiel, but also to Willem Kloos and Martinus Nijhoff, for instance. This was all modeled on the Italian poet Petrarch, who once, in the distant past, did the same thing according to the book’s cover.
The first flaw with this book is that what makes the letter as a literary form enjoyable is that it can be answered. What Menkveld, following Petrarch, wrote are not really letters but rather monologues. A second flaw lies in the choices of people to whom Menkveld’s letters are directed: literary and religious giants, and not, for instance, the girl working at the corner Albert Heijn. This means that the letters are not as personal as Menkveld would like them to seem: they are safe little dioramas in which he displays his literary taste to the world, but is that really a way to create literature?
Menkveld essentially gives away the punch line himself in the letter he writes to Schumann. He describes in detail an event around a piano piece by Schumann that made him cry. A long monologue follows in which Menkveld philosophizes about, well, about what exactly? About how it is possible that a piece of piano music makes him shed tears. He never reaches an answer to that question, but he does let us know that Schumann is on his ‘List,’ the list of music pieces to be played at his funeral. “Because I want them to feel who I was,” Menkveld adds as a leitmotif.
And it is that leitmotif that runs as a thick, red thread through this book. Menkveld wants us to feel who he is. Not by actually granting us a glimpse into his private life—no, the letters to ex-lovers or his mother were probably not literary enough.
Menkveld is rather the paper equivalent of that vague acquaintance who, when you honor him with a visit, forces you into a chair and shamelessly parades his entire record collection before you. You probably know those types. They are not interested in actual conversations. Hence, they prefer to associate with subjects long deceased. At least they listen attentively to their monologues.
With the Highest Respect is therefore primarily a book for people interested in the person Erik Menkveld. The last letter in the book is also addressed to his three children, to show them later who daddy really is. That may be endearing, in itself, but in my opinion, it hardly produces interesting literature. The monologues are simply not profound enough, the subjects too conventional, the perspectives too stale.
For example, his letter to Buddha ends with the thought that he, as a Westerner, has difficulty believing. Unfortunately for Menkveld, just two minutes of Googling is enough to discover that his whole story around ‘Sammaditthi’ doesn’t entirely hold up. And that was precisely the whole perspective on which the letter to Buddha was based, on the idea that ‘Sammaditthi’ is a requirement for belief. A missed opportunity, really, and that was my consistent impression from the beginning to the end of this book.
M.H. Benders
So goes the woeful review—I never received a response to it, not even a rejection or anything like that. As far as I know, it was the only review submitted to the competition. It just goes to show, only enter competitions that are under the auspices of a notary!
(For me, that also applies to literary prizes: I only participate if a notary is involved to oversee proceedings, and if there is no ‘confidentiality contract’ for jury members—in other words, I don’t participate in the current prize circus.)
