'I work in an office I take cards out of a file Once I have taken them out I put them back in again That is it' Twenty-three-year-old Frits
- office worker daydreamer teller of inappropriate jokes
- finds life absurd & inexplicable He lives with his parents who drive him mad He has terrible disturbing dreams of death & destruction Sometimes he talks to a toy rabbit This is the story of ten evenings in Frits's life at the end of December as he drinks smokes sees friends aimlessly wanders the gloomy city streets & tries to make sense of the minutes hours & days that stretch before him Darkly funny & mesmerising The Evenings takes the tiny"idian triumphs & heartbreaks of our everyday lives & turns them into a work of brilliant wit & profound beauty" The funniest most exhilarating novel about boredom ever written If The Evenings had appeared in English in the 1950s it would have become every bit as much a classic as On the Road & The Catcher in the Rye" Herman Koch author of The Dinner" Unlike John Williams Gerard Reve's work was critically acclaimed & sold exceptionally well during his lifetime But just like Stoner The Evenings is brilliantly written & has a maximum impact on the reader's soul" Oscar van Gelderen the Dutch publisher who rediscovered John Williams's Stoner" Very funny & strange Reve is a writer who may yet 'catch on' in the Anglophone world" Lydia Davis winner of the Man Booker International Prize Gerard Reve (1923-2006) is considered one of the greatest post-war Dutch authors & was also the first openly gay writer in the country's history A complicated & controversial character Reve is also hugely popular & critically acclaimed- his 1947 debut The Evenings was chosen as one of the nation's 10 favourite books by the readers of a leading Dutch newspaper while the Society of Dutch Literature ranked it as the Netherlands' best novel of all time