English excerpts from 'Nova' by Daniël Samkalden

Excerpt from Nova by Daniël Samkalden, p.14-15, translated by Paul Vincent Daniël Samkalden, Nova, De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, 2018, 286 p.

The day before, Maarten Schrepel had surrendered control of his life. Without having seen it coming. He had sat on one of the black-leather revolving chairs in the conference room of the publishing house. He had smoothed his hair down nervously and folded his hands together on the cold glass table. There had been many conversations in here about his manuscripts. Difficult conversations. About frugal advances. About disappointing media attention and the fate of the large number of remaining copies. But this time there was excitement in the voice of the man sitting opposite him. He spoke with enthusiastic gestures, banged his boyish hand on the proposal that lay in front of him and sank back in his chair.

Maarten had given his publisher a sidelong glance.

‘So how is it you’ve come to me for this job?’

‘I want you to write it because I have to be sure the facts are right. I don’t want any pranks. And because Joost and Remco won’t do it. I don’t mind your knowing that.’ He leant forward.

‘And because I liked the character of Lars, Maarten. Keep that in the back of your mind when you’re writing. The same sort of composition. The same light touch you suddenly managed there.’

Lars Varga was the protagonist of Schrepel’s fifth novel. In four hundredplus pages it tells the story of a weather man who falls on hard times and tries to make a career in politics. His personal decline translates into a growing number of seats in the opinion polls. The book sold twelve thousand copies. A record for the writer so far.

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Excerpt from Nova by Daniël Samkalden, p.182-183, translated by Paul Vincent

Malicious tongues maintained that De Poes was trying to prop up his ruined image on the backs of poor animals. And it was incontrovertibly true that his exhibitionist campaigns had made him the centre of attention again. But that was the last thing he wanted, he declared.

I’m just taking the side of the animals. Animals that are helpless and can’t defend themselves. In their defence, anything goes, he was quoted as saying in the women’s supplement of the Saturday paper.

I’ve had enough of the double morality of humans who like to take the easy way out. I want to expose it. The rest doesn’t interest me. And it doesn’t interest me either whether or not you’re prepared to believe me.

He went on to present an outfit stripped of leather and wool at the annual Animals’ Charity Ball. He had himself photographed naked in the mud for a campaign against the mistreatment of pigs. And recently he was the talk of the town when he chained himself in a cock’s comb hairdo to the sliding doors of a massive shed where a hundred and forty thousand possibly infected laying hens were on the point of being disposed of. It had become a full-time enterprise. The preparations, the stunts, the community service.

There was not much else he got excited about. Not that he was indifferent, as had been the case for half a lifetime, but on the contrary because his nerves seemed to be naked beneath his skin. The callus. The lazy white fat, the cloudy hardening of the arteries, it had all gone, he had found himself hypersensitive in an empty, bleak world. He wanted to go on breathing pure air. He would keep the wound clean that had been made in him. In his body, near his belly, somewhere around his stomach and his liver, was a stabbing pain. A gloomy obstruction that had pulled him into a sombre world. It had changed him. It had dulled his charms and made him more silent.

As inflammations do: they eat up your energy.

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