Camera Obscura
This was the most difficult to find book on the List so far.
“Camera Obscura” is a book by the Dutch writer Nicolaas Beets under the pseudonym
Hildebrand. There is supposed to be an English translation out there and I asked
my local bookshop to help me find it. This took them about half a year and
several failed attempts to finally get it home... in Dutch. Resigned to this I
used Goggle Lense to translate every page from old Dutch to English and
painstakingly read through those haphazard translations. That was a weird and often
confusing experience and one I am not particularly keen to repeat.
“Camera Obscura” is not a single story, but more of an anthology
of short stories that have little if anything in common. The only recurring
element is that the author often refer to himself. Some text appears to be
letters to Hildebrand, others are essays on themes such as travelling, seeing
friends from childhood and watching animals in menageries or at fairs. The
longest and by far most interesting story is about Hildebrand spending some
weeks with an uncle and aunt and particularly his cousin Pieter Stastok. Both
are in this scenario students with Pieter an almost comically pedantic and
helpless character. Hildebrand attempts to help him but whether it be al billiard
or taking girls for an outing in a boat, Pieter Stastok manages to make a fool
of himself.
While the individual stories are all quite different both in
tone and topic, they all help to paint sceneries of daily life in The
Netherland in the 1830’ies. We get portraits particularly of members of the
middle class, but also glimpses of the serving class. We meet them in their
homes and in their interactions with each other. We hear a lot about
fairgrounds, about visiting farms, about travelling. I believe this is the
first novel on the List to describe travel by railway, something entirely new and
exotic at this time. All these scenes help explain the title of the novel. A
camera obscure is used to project a view down on a flat surface to help a
painter produce a rendition of the view. In the same way, the short stories
project images to us of scenes in The Netherlands so that we can imagine them
in the right perspective.
What are then the impressions we get? Mostly that people were
in The Netherlands in the 1830’ies the same way as people are at any time in
most of the places in the world. Some are pedantic, some think they are funny.
Some are choleric and upset while others are embarrassed, either of themselves
or their kin. The doctor who arrives on a blistering hot day in a small town to
find his old friend from his student days, only to find that his family is a
mess with unruly children and obstinate servants and after hardly an hour
cannot wait to get away again. There is an essay on education of children that
probably tells a lot about schools in those days and even a rant warning about
trying to be amusing when you are not.
I am not entirely certain it is working for me though. Only
the story of Pieter Stastok is long and detailed enough to make the scenes
really come alive. To some extent I do blame to awkward reading process, but I
did get enough out of it to catch the idea. There is something of interest in
the short stories, but I do wish they would have been woven together in a
coherent whole. Maybe you must be Dutch to really appreciate it.
In any case, I cannot say I found reason enough for this
book to be on the List. It is not a bad book, just not enough. From my movie
list I have learned that if something is difficult to find, it is usually for a
reason. So apparently it is with books.
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