Bak by Sietse de Vries

Abstract

reviews Sietse de Vries. Bak. Ljouwert, Netherlands. Friese Pers. 2012. isbn 9789033002625 In this slim novel, Sietse de Vries continues to play with variations on the crime-novel formula. In Kugels foar Kant (see WLT, Oct. 2003, 126), the detective in search of the murderer is himself murdered. In Potstro Fongers (see WLT, Mar. 2010, 62), neither the motive for the crime nor its perpetrator is ever discovered. In Bak, the reader knows both the motive and the perpetrator from the start, but the police and the public remain in the dark. Obviously, the author is playing with the reader as well. Here the tension is not so much whether the guilty will be discovered as it is when and how. The guilty one in this case is Sherp Bak, who has little to show for his fifty years of life. Bak has been an underachiever since childhood, now stuck in an undistinguished twenty-year career as a newspaper reporter. More or less accepting of his unremarkable life, he cannot, however, tolerate others’ view of him as a loser. Thus when Remco Beets, an arrogant city councilman, half drunk, begins to assault him with physical and verbal abuse, Bak fights back. When Beets tells him that he’s the laughingstock of Frisian journalism and contemptuously spits in his face, it triggers a violent rage that makes him grab Beets’s head and bang it against the floor so hard and often that it kills his antagonist. Deftly, Bak clears the scene of all criminal evidence, and deftly De Vries turns his killer-reporter into a journalist assigned to the murder case. Ironically, Bak gains public stature as he manages to “discover” background details that point to possible mafia involvement. De Vries fools the reader, who expects that surely this time Bak will be unmasked. Instead, the police, impressed by Bak’s sleuthing ability, recruit him as their chief assistant in the expanding criminal investigation. No doubt De Vries is aware that he’s straining the reader’s credulity, an otherwise serious flaw in a detective novel. An underachieving reporter who turns into a star by becoming a killer and a betrayer of his profession without raising the suspicion of colleagues or police may make for delicious irony but hardly for a challenging engagement by the serious reader of crime novels. For the appreciative reader of Sietse de Vries, however, the treat of an entertaining page-turner is enough. Henry J. Baron Calvin College Tamas Dobozy. Siege 13. Minneapolis, Minn. Milkweed. 2013. isbn 9781571310972 In Tamas Dobozy’s previous book, Last Notes and Other Stories (see WLT Nov. 2006, 55), Hungarian survivors of World War II are judged because they failed “to gaze back in recognition , and use the remorse that gaze should have occasioned against the illusions that comforted and rotted them for the rest of their lives.” In Siege 13—the siege is that of Budapest by Russian forces in 1944–45, thirteen the number of the stories—one character, speaking for many others, questions whether any of the survivors deserve a future. Even when they might, the collection as a whole allows neither characters nor readers the possibility of escaping the effect of those events or the realization that they are subject to unknowable fate. The events are horrifying enough. Several stories repeat situations in which civilians are used as human shields; bodies are crammed into doorways in Kálmán Square (known as Moscow Square under the communists and until very recently); sewers offer the illusion of the possibility of escape. At least twice, embedded in painstaking and often excruciating descriptions of those horrifying events, flames surface from ruptured gas mains to illuminate the scene, but in every story, whether it deals directly with the siege or is set in Canada decades later, physical or more often psychic undercurrents erupt to break through the characters’ attempts to forget and to reimagine themselves. Conclusions, if not resolutions, are divided between need of “the passing of trauma from one generation to another” and the recogni60 World Literature Today ...