'A manuscript gets angry if you leave it alone,' Flemish novelist Stefan Brijs (Genk, 1969) once stated in a broadcast of Plastic Radio, referring to his working method. Brijs writes in long, continuous periods in which the writer says he does not even run errands. Recently, Brijs, who broke through internationally with The Angel Maker (2006), his new novel Without love.
Paul has just been left by his wife, Ava has just cast aside her boyfriend. Disappointed in love, the two find each other one night in a movie house and, with the prickliness that indicates genuine affection, a deep but soon unequal friendship develops between them. Faster than Paul realises it, as a reader you feel the love is thoroughly out of step. It takes a third person before Paul himself realises that he has fallen in love with Ava.
Focuskiller
The plot of Without love rushes the reader across the pages, while the language is nonetheless unremarkable or compelling. The outside world is also largely absent: no social observations or stances. The thus theatrical-looking setting of this story does, incidentally, benefit compassion for the main characters. Mere interaction between Paul and Ava drives the plot forward. Even the smartphone is written out of this story, which Without love gives a pleasantly historical glow and looks like a radical statement by Brijs. That absence of the focus-killer of our time gives food for thought. Perhaps a smartphone for a plot is akin to a gun - only deploy it if there really is no other way.
Paul and Ava are given the late-twenties designation, but rather come across as forties. This observation comes from a forty-something who longs for the late twenties, when life was still fundamentally open. I caught myself while reading several times exclaiming to both Paul and Ava: 'come on, don't worry, get over it - anything is still possible!'
Everyday cruelty
Without love Reminiscent of the film classic When Harry Met Sally (1989), about the possibility or impossibility of platonic friendship. Only this time without a happy ending. Bernard, Ava's new love, has slightly sinister traits, which for a brief moment at the end gives this novel the guise of a thriller. This pleasantly adds to the impatience with which you want to read on, and is no doubt deliberately deployed by the author.
Paul's dating woes are very poignantly described. Merciless is the carelessness with which Paul plunges into the world of personals without much faith. The nonchalance on his part, and how it turns out fatally for his two dates, the everyday cruelty of it draws through the reader like a migraine attack. What is clever about this is that neither Paul, Ava, nor the other characters are malicious: as a reader, you understand all the positions, but things still go wrong.
Decisive details
In short: a novel like a classic drama of fate. In which, unfortunately, the side characters are somewhat caricatured, for the benefit of Paul and Ava looking more believable. The way Paul's dates are characterised is a little too simplistic - one gives Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince gift ('wrong', the author winks towards the reader), the other has at home a plot prediction reproduction of Hokusai's The dream of the fisherman's wife hanging above her bed (again, 'wrong'). It annoys me how these characters are so dismissed. At the same time, perhaps those raunchy judgements are also exactly the details by which the success or failure of a date is decided.
The weightlessness, or rather unhealthily detached manner with which Paul strides through life closely resembles depression. If Brijs seems to want to say something with this novel, perhaps it is this: love is impossible in the midst of the vacuum of depression. Attempting to do so anyway: that will only result in victims.
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