A REVIEW OF
MISCHA’S KOORTS BY GERARD VAN EMMERIK

Mischa’s Koorts (Mischa’s Fever) by Dutch writer Gerard van Emmerik was published by Veen in Amsterdam in 1998. The following review of it was published in Koinos magazine, Amsterdam, issue 20, 4^th Quarter 1998, pp. 27-31. The black-and-white photos of the author and bookcover that accompanied the original article have been replaced by colour ones.

A Feverish Summer Romance
by Peter de Jong

In September the editors received a small book by a Dutch author of whom I hadn’t previously heard. According to the back cover blurb, Gerard van Emmerik, born in 1955, had already written two collections of short stories. Now this is his first novel, about the relation between a fourteen-year-old boy and an adult man. Is what we have here the umpteenth fairy tale, germinating from the dearest fantasies of a hungry man, or, in the spirit of our times, perhaps the story of a traumatized individual, who traces his misery back to his sexuality having been awakened too early?

Fortunately, neither. Mischa’s koorts (Mischa’s fever) is a well-written and ingeniously constructed story of a lonely boy, his nonplussed mother, and a man, Bruno, whom the boy meets at a public swimming pool. Cliches lurk in ambush, but the author has been able to successfiılly avoid them. Facilitated by the structure of the book, as a reader you tumble from one surprise to another. You jump back and forth in time through the many short chapters, and get the feeling that you are involved in solving a puzzle, the pieces of which are falling into place one after another. Almost the entire story is narrated from the perspective of the boy, sometimes written in the first person, but almost at the end of the book you experience the most important events a second time through the eyes of Bruno, in the form of a long fragment from his diary. I really no longer knew with whom I identified most, with the man, who hesitantly establishes contact with the boy, or with the boy who, like myself, was wrestling with adolescence during the 1970s.

The description of how the contact between the boy and the man arises is charmingly written. They both feel deeply attracted to each other, but there is also hesitaney and anxiety. The man has behind his back a marriage in which he repressed his true feelings, and is still trying to convince himself that there is nothing out of the ordinary going on with him. The boy is haunted by horror scenarios suggested by a young friend: Wanna bet he wants to fuck you? But Mischa knows perfectly well what he wants. He fantasizes about the hairy body of a man, and he hopes that the man at the swimming pool who smiled at him in such a friendly way and complimented him on his looks will make his fantasies come true. It’s only with some difficulty that he brings Bruno that far. He assumes the name of his energetic friend Marc, and the fırst time he goes around to Bruno’s place, he deliberates feverishly about what he should do next.

Marc would approach it more shrewdly, and fırst move his chair over, sprawl in it with a şort of natural ease, his crotch provocatively thrust forward, and then sigh something inane like, “The water wasn’t clean.”

And then there is still the mother who walked out on her unfaithful husband, taking her son with her, in search of a new life far from the big city. She is grimly trying not to miss her ex and is annoyed with her son, who is so silent and keeps secrets from her. When she discovers whom Mischa is spending the afternoons of his summer vacation with, she at fırst falls into a panic. Then, however, she decides that the modern thing to do is to adopt the role of super-tolerant mother, with the motto, “If my son is happy with his friend, I am happy for him.”

Thus, with the same undertone of humor which characterizes the whole book, Van Emmerik deseribes how the mother allows herself to be interviewed by the Dutch Sexual Reform Association’s magazine Sekstant, and how she drags Mischa along to a pedophile evening at their centre on an Amsterdam canal. All this time, however, she has still not met her son’s “husband.” Inescapably the evening falls when Bruno, the man with whom Miseha is experiencing love and sex on an almost daily basis, suddenly comes past the home of Mischa and his mother for dinner. Mother behaves like a nervous sshoolgirl and Bruno is revealed as the conventional, grey adult that he in reality is. For Mischa, the evening is  a bit of an anticlimax. When, a couple of days later, he unintentionally gets to see Bruno’s diary, his dream goes bust, and the story takes a dramatic turn. Mischa’s fever is over.

Van Emmerik appears to have an aptitude for getting inside the feelings of a fourteen-year-old. That also becomes clear at the end of the story. The relationship, which is at first experienced by both as pleasant and exciting, miscarries at the moment when the mother becomes too intrusive. Mischa does not want full openness; on the contrary, he has the need for privacy, for a secret which his mother does not know down to the tiniest details. Thus, in this relation keeping a secret is not something that is imposed by the adult, as is often thought, but is what the young person desires.

I find the addition of a short fragment at the end of the book, in which Van Emmerik suggests that twenty years later Mischa is living with a friend and thinks back on Bruno as his initiator, to be a bit unfortunate. Why does Mischa have to be pigeonholed like this? Is it in order to make the story more acceptable for readers in the 1990s?

Aside from this, I am very enthusiastic about this novel. It is a beautiful story about a controversial subject, one which is seldom written about at this level.

Gerard van Emmerik
Mischa’s koorts
Amsterdam: Veen, 1998
ISBN 90 204 5831 0
NLG 27,90