Fiction Alfred, the narrator, an aspiring geologist, has an ambition, to find a meteorite. It sounds simple but it isn't. On one, more immediate level, by locating a meteorite and taking a sample away with him will help him complete his thesis. The examiners will be impressed and his academic future will be secured. But there is also the laying to rest of the ghost of his scientist father, who fell to his death when Alfred was only seven years old. Alfred's life has been a sequence of disappointments. He has also wanted to be a musician. Although his mother does try to help him, she is an inhibiting presence.
Originally published in Dutch in 1966, as De Bezige Bij, W.F. Hermans's Beyond Sleep is a European classic and remains a landmark post-war novel. It is a study of disaffection and draws on the earlier achievements of Knut Hamsun and Kafka.
Hermans quite brilliantly lowers the emotional pitch, instead of frenzied exasperation and paranoia, he instead offers a narrator who is world weary, observant, mildly disengaged yet eager to improve his situation. His problems come from within. Alfred must contend with his own sense of failure. That said, he is attempting a rather organised assault on them.
This is the 40th anniversary of the publication, it is also the first English translation and a prime example of Herman's deadpan tone.
Alfred tells his story with a candour that demands attention from the opening sentence and sustains his narrative through bleak humour and a jaunty fatalism, to a finale that is both amusing and darkly ironic.
In common with his geologist narrator, Willem Frederik Hermans, who was born in Amsterdam in 1921 and died in 1995, was a scientist, a physical geographer. Hermans was a university lecturer before leaving his country in 1973 to settle in France. Long before making this move, he was an established literary figure with an extensive and diverse body of work.
Initially he had been a poet. But in 1949, when he was 28, he was to change literary direction with the publication of his first novel, The Tears of the Acacias, a cynical, near satirical narrative set in occupied Amsterdam and in Brussels, during the liberation. Throughout his essays, plays, poetry and prose, he often experimented with form, but favoured clear, sharp prose.
This characteristic directness has been ably rendered in Ina Rilke's translation, for which she was nominated by a panel of literary scholars - and will no doubt receive an award. Beyond Sleep, dating from the exciting period when Gunter Grass was beginning to assert himself internationally, should enjoy a belated second coming through this English translation. Also included in this English edition is an author's note, which Hermans, then settled in Paris, wrote in 1978 to the 15th printing of his novel. In it, he acknowledges the practice some writers have of making changes to already published works. "Some reviewers object to this - no doubt because their criticism of the original book no longer applies to the altered version. All the better, I'd say." He then admits to having made some 250 changes to that 15th printing of Beyond Sleep, adding "But the book is still the same." Even in that brief note, it is possible to hear the voice of Alfred in that of his creator.
Hermans published his war novel, The Dark Room of Damocles, in 1958, the year before The Tin Drum. Less than four years later, in 1962, the English version of The Dark Room of Damocles was published - and will be re-issued next year. Beyond Sleep is fresh and funny for all its darkness and defies time. It could easily have been published this year for the first time.
Interestingly, considering his reputation as an experimentalist, it is a conventional narrative.
Most of the urgency comes from Hermans's use of the present tense. As the novel opens, Alfred has arrived in Oslo from Amsterdam on a mission. He is going to join a geological expedition. First he visits the elderly professor who is supervising two of the students on the expedition. Alfred, determined to make his name through an important discovery, needs a set of aerial photographs. His efforts at borrowing these photographs result in a memorable set-piece of comic mistiming. It also introduces the edgy humour underlying Alfred's narrative. Gaining access to Professor Nummedal is not easy as the porter acts like a guardian of sorts and ignores the fact that Alfred has not only arranged a meeting, he also has a letter of welcome from the professor.
Eventually the porter allows Alfred to see if the professor is in. "But I suppress my rage," reports Alfred, "I'm prepared to have pity on him, like his employer, who evidently sees fit to keep him on despite his inability to perform simple tasks, such as receiving visitors without treating them as though they can drop dead for all his cares." The professor does not prove all that much easier to deal with and has a preference for leaden jokes which amuse him no end. "Nummedal bursts out laughing. Even when he laughs the creases in the far too ample skin on his face remain for the most part vertical."
Although no aerial photographs are forthcoming, the professor, who turns out to be blind, does take Alfred to lunch. Just as he is planning to join an expedition, another much more dangerous one is already in progress. Alfred reads about the Dutch Himalayan expedition and considers it in the light of the relative physical hardship he is expecting to experience in Northern Norway. Never an outdoors type himself, Alfred makes it clear that roughing it in tough conditions is not his idea of fun.
The more he becomes obsessed with finding his meteorite, the more his mind enters free fall. While taking a photograph for a souvenir, rather than a documentary source, he thinks of his mother and sister back home, and then recalls his sister's friend. "She wasn't in the house more than ten minutes. Pretty young, eighteen I'd say. Oh well, I could show her the photos some time and tell her about my trip. Might even be someone I could marry, two years from now, say, when I've finished my thesis. We could get engaged on the day I receive my PhD."
The daydreams are replaced by nightmares. Alfred knows he is not suited to being a diligent archivist "like ninety-nine out of a hundred researchers! I want to find something spectacular!" His impatience has disastrous consequences.
Hermans never loses control and sustains both the horror and the irony until the closing sentence with its cruel twist. This is a masterclass in the art of realist narrative at its most viciously moral if laconically underplayed.
Eileen Battersby is the Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Beyond Sleep By W.F.Hermans Translated by Ina Rilke Harvill Secker, 307pp.£17
