Column | The literature is alive and kicking, you will hear

The Libris Literature Prize 2025 will be awarded next Monday. To Marijke Schermer please, if possible. Eight years ago I was at the presentation at the Amstel Hotel. Not as a nominee, not even as a invited person. I was just a follower or aspiring editor of the student magazine Propria Cures And had been given the task of writing a report of the evening. That meant paying attention while the editors who are also unsolicited open all the remnants of the buffet, took a dip in the Amstel and smoked one cigar together. One of my superiors gave me a tip. « Quote from the jury report. That is always terribly poorly written. »

He hadn’t lied. The nominated books were recommended in totally interpretable adjectives. « A moving novel, » « a vulnerable novel, » « a shocking novel, » « a fascinating novel. » A lesson: a meaningless compliment is an insult.

Since then I read The jury report every year. Reports actually, plural, because the first appears in the announcement of the shortlist. In this year’s shortlist report, the jury mentions twice that it was looking for ‘excellence’ when compiling the list. A word reminiscent of University Collegesor at the party range of the Albert Heijn.

A bit silly undertaking of course, that’s how the report starts to keep you busy with something so banal as novels while the world is bleaching. « In the distance you can hear the war fiddling and we read a book. » Just when you think the prize money is going to VolodyMyr Zensky this year, the jury scribbles back. Because when the free world is under pressure, everything that extends our mind and challenges our thinking and our (sic) fantasy stimulates defenseless. « 

And defenseless are novels indeed, especially as soon as you try to catch them in such drug sentences as the Libris jury this year.

« We are immersed in a narrative that also plays along as an impetus for thinking. »

« There are sharp touches with different discourses of our time. »

« From the first pages, a disturbance in the story as the thunder of warstrigin is far away. » (Still that war again.)

« This is not a novel reading with the cosiness of beach sounds in the background. »

« The tentacles of the different storylines grab you and drag you along. »

Well my question is: should we find this normal? Every year literary reviewers subject these jury reports to one close reading To alert readers that « a sublime novel » is more likely to win than « a handsome novel, » but you never hear them about the fact that those reports are largely illegible. As long as this is the level of the jury members of the most important literary prize in the Netherlands, I really don’t want to hear anything about the reading skills of young people.

In sentences that are so crooked that you get a spontaneous bloody nose, the jury explains that one novel is « a masterpiece », and the other « a festival of words and metaphors. » Not only that: the Dutch letters are excellent in their totality. The word « breeding ground » falls. « This shortlist shows that Dutch literature is alive and kicking. » Spring, you hear! Certainly not dead! With which Grammys ceremony would have last noted that music was noticed that music Alive and Kicking Is?

Now that the DWDD book of the month election no longer exists, the shortlist of the Libris is the highest honor that you as a writer in this country can receive, apart from the win of course. You would actually give all six nominees a compensation of 50,000 euros. That is not possible. The only thing the foundation of the prize can do is let a group of linguists fly in next year. If we are not at war by that time, of course.

Tessa Sparreboom is Neerlandicus and former editor of Propria Cures.

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