A fairy tale that summons up a vast Netherlands encompassing Europe’s highest peaks and a captivating pair of circus performers hunting for work.

In the Dutch Mountains

the Chekhovian, realistic tale, and the Borgesian metaphorical one. Here we can see that propensity given geographical shape, in a Netherlands with a sober, rational north, and a wild south, rife with corruption and incomprehensible dialects and governed by a more dreamlike logic.  Other things are being played with here, too. Our narrator is not Dutch at all, but a Spanish highway engineer sitting in an empty school in Zaragoza; and he is constantly interrupting himself with notes and comments and worries about the kind of story he is telling, why he is inventing it, and what it all might mean. The beauty, and the slippery relativity, of language is a central concern.  Along the way, the Dutch themselves come in for some pointed analysis:   Dutch people do not merely meet; they confront each other. They bore their luminous eyes into the other person's and weigh his soul. There are no hiding places. Not even their homes can be described as such. They leave their curtains open and regard this as a virtue. I had taken the trouble to learn their strange language, which consists largely of harsh sounds for which the upper area of the throat is used a great deal. I think this must be the result of the inclement conditions, such as breached dykes, east winds and pack ice, which plagued them in the past.   (Adrienne Dixon's translation is really good.) These apparently naturalistic observations mix surprisingly easily with his Snow-Queen fable from the ‘Dark South’, putting you as a reader in the strange and pleasant position of constantly interrogating the story even as you're reading it.  Nor does it build to any particular symbolic point; it is more about playing with these ideas as they arise, and allowing us to share in the thought process. ‘I like writing but I don't want to live as a writer,’ our Spanish narrator nudges at one point. ‘Being printed equals being permitted to think aloud.’

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