At the age of 22, the Dutch author Wessel te Gussinklo tried to shape himself as a writer when he wrote a novel ‘just out of nowhere’. His characters are people who are ‘on the edge’. His novels are grueling, authentic, intoxicating and addictive. He died on Wednesday at the age of 82.
Bo van HouwelingenOctober 20, 2023, 6:55 PM
The queen of the arts, that is what Wessel te Gussinklo (1941-2023) called literature. Literature is the only art form that can “describe from the inside what it is like to exist,” he said in an interview with Nieuwsuur in 2020. And that is exactly what the writer did with his work: show what it is like to be, from the deepest thoughts of his characters.
His best known is the obsessive boy Ewout Meyster from the multi-award-winning Meyster cycle with which Te Gussinklo achieved literary fame. Initially only among a small group of gourmets, but later also among a larger audience; he won several prizes with it.
Wessel te Gussinklo was born on January 9, 1941 in Utrecht. His father was responsible for a number of Dutch resistance fighters who were in hiding with the family. When this was discovered during a raid, Wessel senior was summarily executed by the Germans in the backyard. Three-year-old Wessel will hardly have had any memories of this, but his father’s heroism left a mark on his life and work. In his novels the characters are determined to become someone; a hero preferably.
Ewout Meyster – in whom we may recognize a young Te Gussinklo – emulates figures such as Churchill and Roosevelt, men who have created themselves, completely à la Sartre. L’existence précède l’essence: being precedes being. You exist first, but only later do you become someone. Who, you decide, through actions and words.
‘It’s all polish’
Existentialism was a revelation for the student Te Gussinklo. In an interview with the Zeeland newspaper PZC: “It’s all polish, I understood then. No one is themselves. Everyone is constantly trying to shape themselves. You are constantly under pressure from others who make demands and expect something from you. (…) In that force field you have to shape yourself somehow, remain yourself.”
At the age of 22, Te Gussinklo attempted to shape himself as a writer when he wrote a novel “just out of nowhere”. It was rejected by a publisher and the spark disappeared. “Every day I went to the café and drank and talked about writing, but nothing happened,” Te Gussinklo said in an interview with Tzum. “When I was 33, I stopped drinking overnight. That was ‘The year of crucifixion’: the year in which you say to yourself: do you want to die as a man or live as a man?”
He decided to devote himself entirely to writing, which resulted in The Forbidden Garden. For ten years, no one wanted to publish the bizarre novel about the little boy Ewout Meyster. Until he received help from writer and journalist Bert Pol in 1986. The Forbidden Garden promptly won the Anton Wachter Prize and the debutante grant from the Dutch Foundation for Literature.
For De Assignment, the extensive sequel from 1995, Te Gussinklo received several prizes, including the Bordewijk Prize and the ECI Prize for Writers of Now. The book was nominated for the Libris Literature Prize. The latter happened again with The High Stacker – the third part of the Meyster cycle from 2019. He ultimately did not win, but did receive the Zeeland Book Prize and the BookSpot Literature Prize. A year later he won the latter prize again, but this time with Back to the Hartz, the fourth and final part of the cycle.
Complicated main characters
In his prose, Te Gussinklo focused on “the deeper grounds of the things that surround us” and looked very closely at the enigma that is man. He circled it, approaching it from all sides to find out how everything functions. His main characters are complicated. These are people who are “on the edge”, who try to defuse threats. “My characters always wander into a swamp with impassable mud. They struggle to find paths to get out. They are constantly exploiting their feelings, limitations and talents,” said Te Gussinklo in an interview with de Volkskrant.
In his novels you will find few dialogues and few actions, Te Gussinklo was about the forces behind it, about the nuances of the emotional world. And to describe that inner chaos, his style had to be complex, with pincer constructions, dashes, brackets and commas. Sentences that thunder on, words that are repeated over and over, almost like incantations. Te Gussinklo made no concessions and did not write to entertain. His novels are grueling but also authentic, intoxicating and in that sense addictive.
Striving for omnipotence
In addition to being a novelist, Te Gussinklo was also an essayist. In 2015, his major cultural-philosophical essay We will be equal to God was published, in which he writes about how the pursuit of omnipotence and the unfulfillable desire for limitlessness determine the fate of nations, cultures and people. Once again not an easy task. For the more light-hearted Te Gussinklo, readers could visit his unsurpassed blog, on which he moaned uncontrollably about our culture and society.
He did not get involved much in the writing world. After the early death of his first wife Jacomine, he no longer felt like it. He moved to quiet Zeeland with his second wife Odilia. He needed peace and quiet, to be able to immerse himself in his characters, to smoke his cigarettes peacefully far away from the demands and expectations of others, to be able to completely be Wessel in Gussinklo. He died there on Wednesday, at the age of 82.
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2023-10-20 16:55:55
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