Author(s): Nescio

Fiction

H. F. Gr nloh was a successful Dutch businessman, executiveof the Holland-Bombay Trading Company and father offour, with a secret life: under the pseudonym Nescio (Latin for"I don't know"), he wrote a series of short stories that wentunrecognized at the time but that are now widely consideredthe best prose ever written in Dutch.Nescio's stories look back on the enthusiasms of youth withan achingly beautiful melancholy comparable to the work ofAlain-Fournier and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He writes of youngdreams from the perspective of adult resignation, but reinhabitsyouthful ambition and adventure so fully that the laterperspective is the one thrown into doubt-and with languageas fresh as when it was written a century ago. His last longstory, written and set during World War II, is a remarkableevocation of the Netherlands in wartime and a hymn to ourcapacity to take refuge in memory and imagination.This is great literature-capturing the Dutch landscape andscenes of Amsterdam with a remarkable poetry, and expressingthe spirit of the country of businessmen and van Gogh,merchants and visionaries. This first translation of Nescio intoEnglish-all the major works and a broad selection of hisshorter stories-is a literary event.