Bertram Koeleman once again chooses a wonderfully insane starting point

Nostalgia is a treacherous state of mind. One moment you can happily imagine yourself being 20 again when you hear the first bars of that old pop song. The next moment you sigh, ‘everything used to be better’ and you know that your best years are definitely behind you.

In This is your time Mart Rebius, in his forties, opposes this; he just brings his best years to the now. Every month he throws a big house party that recreates the 1990s in detail. Only music from the nineties is played, old episodes of TMF are watched on sagging leather couches (on VHS!), posters of Jurassic Park, cans of Schultenbräu are drunk. The partygoers are given a strict dress code and act out dialogues Pulp Fiction and have to leave their phones at home. Anything to make Mart feel like he’s 18 and attending a student party.

It doesn’t stop there. When his father dies, Mart has an intense flashback to his 6th birthday during the funeral; he sees his father lying on the floor with a bloody nose, surrounded by visitors. Something happened that day, but what? Mart – convinced that this is a key moment in his life – buys his parental home and uses old photos to reconstruct the furnishings as precisely as possible, down to the toaster. Actors are cast who resemble the visitors from back then; a man is found who looks bizarrely like Mart’s father from that time. With them, in that house, Mart reenacts his 6th birthday, hoping to unlock his memory.

It is another wonderfully insane premise by Bertram Koeleman (1979), who previously wrote two novels and two collections of short stories that also revolve around eccentric figures who lead a strange lifestyle (such as the lonely manager of an estate in The family friend2013) or are marked by a mysterious event (like the frustrated writer in The wrapping heart, 2018). Koeleman’s prose breathes mystery, behind all the craziness there is always something threatening.

An eerie feeling

So too This is your time, in which the reader is slowly but surely overcome by an eerie feeling through casual allusions: why do people keep saying that Mart was ‘a difficult child’? Why does he no longer have nails on his ring and index fingers? Why doesn’t he remember his old neighbor? Why is a friend’s apartment suspiciously bare and still have price tags on the couch cushions? What does that old family friend’s slip of the tongue mean?

Meanwhile, Koeleman questions the concepts of memories and identity. Is the image you have of yourself formed by all the things you have experienced or only by the events you can really remember? Can you know yourself if you don’t remember something important from your past? To what extent do you have control over your memories? Should you even look back, or is it better to focus on the future?

It is admirable that Koeleman manages to come close to the elusive and capricious of memories by describing very vividly the effect objects or a certain environment can have on you. When Mart returns to the neighborhood of his youth, it goes as follows: ‘This place, which was such a decisive part of his youth, had continued to exist independently of him, its windows and doors and sidewalks and garages almost stubbornly unchanged, as if they wanted to show him that they could do without him, and that his presence had made no difference.’

Open and exposed

Koeleman’s style is strong as ever; In this novel it is the denouement that is somewhat disappointing. The writer focused so much on the plot in the first half of the novel, by covering it richly with mystery and question marks, that he apparently felt the need to resolve the plot head on. That is to say: something really intense, big and secret has happened. Koeleman abandons the pleasantly unrealistic aspect of the novel and suddenly becomes whole specific.

The curtain has been pulled back and with the facts so open and exposed on the table, the reader promptly comes up with all kinds of irritating, banal questions, questions about concrete matters that previously seemed completely unimportant. Where does Mart actually get the money for that whole house and all those parties? What kind of life was he living before this whole thing? Isn’t it very unbelievable that he never noticed anything about the big secret?

As a reviewer I try to guard against the wise-cracking ‘wouldn’t it have been better if…’, but wouldn’t it have been better if nothing special had happened in Mart’s youth? What if it was just a figment of the imagination, an obsession with the past, arising from the fear of losing control of the past, and thus control of yourself? Because that is indeed what is going on with control freak Mart. ‘Time passed without his ordering it,’ Koeleman writes somewhere – a key sentence; That’s where the problem lies, in Mart’s head and not outside of it, not in the actual events. Just the way nostalgia works: it’s not about what really happened, it’s about what you made of it in your mind.