The Opposite of a Person, Lieke Marsman

If people were evil, and I wished to be good, then I had to make sure I was the opposite of a person.

How did I come to buy this unusual book (on kindle)? I have no idea. Whoever’s review it was that I read put your hand up in comments so you may have my thanks.

Marsman it appears is a Dutch poet. “She is the Dutch Poet Laureate [Dichter des Vaderlands] for the period 2021 to 2023” (wiki) and is now in her 30s. We must assume this is her first novel.

1.

As a child I loved to fantasise about being a cucumber. In the evenings I would lie with my arms against my body under my dinosaur duvet … and for just a moment try to take on the form of my favourite vegetable.

The prose is sparse. Chapters are short. The novel proceeds as a series of prose and poetry pieces, fiction and fact. Making up an interesting whole, a story of love and love lost.

The protagonist is
Ida, 29 years old
Blonde hair, first greys
1m 76cm
Will not be a professor or headteacher any time soon
Is, however, a climate scientist
Currently unemployed

Ida has just started a relationship with another woman. How Dutch is this? After their first date: “Robin and I say goodbye to each other at our bikes. I promise I’ll call her soon. She leans over and kisses me quickly on the mouth.”

3.

I started off as a student in Political Science, and when I became preoccupied with climate change it was primarily as an engaging political-philosophical question: how to reconcile a fact like the rising of the Earth’s temperature, the reversal of which requires a long-term solution, with the short-term perspective shared by almost all politicians?

Ida is now in the final year of a master’s in Earth Sciences. “‘My little intellectual,’ says Robin [herself a grad student in Literature]”. She applies for and is almost immediately granted an internship at an Italian institute documenting the removal of an old dam in the Alps. “On the science page of the BBC website I read that you cannot dream unless you sleep for more than ten minutes. I sleep for six minutes and dream about Robin.”

She and Robin fight; get over it; discuss (French writer) Marguerite Duras, the subject of Robin’s thesis. Ida gives us chapters on Italian dam disasters, homosexuality, Naomi Klein, Joni Mitchell, therapy, her parents.

“Robin pauses as she’s about to turn off her night light. ‘Do you love me?’ … ‘Yes,’ I say at last, but she’s already fallen asleep…”

Ida flies to Italy, takes a bus up into the mountains. The institute give her a cabin in a holiday park. In the morning she picks up her hire car and reports for work. Her job is to be not research, but to write up existing findings for the European Union, to convince journalists to cover the project, to make sure a film crew is in place for the moment of the dam’s demolition.

The context within which the narrative is inching forward is the coming end of the world as we know it, perhaps the end of mankind altogether; Ida’s (and no doubt, the author’s) thoughts and what she is reading; Ida attends a symposium on global warming in Milan; but we are never far from Ida’s feelings for Robin.

A chapter begins “That tackling global warming begins with having fewer children is something that is frequently met with a lot of resistance.” And, in the next “If all women were from now on only to have one child, the world population would be halved by 2075.”

“Still, if Robin were to ask me, I’d immediately want to have a child with her.”

There is a chapter on Copernicus. I spent a year on the early astronomers way back when. Let me say here that Copernicus did not DISCOVER that the sun was the centre of the galaxy. What he did was produce an immensely complex mathematical model based on the ASSUMPTION that the sun was the centre, from which Kepler deduced that the orbits of the planets were elliptical, from which in turn Newton deduced the laws of gravity.

She goes on to Descartes, whom I also studied (retained is another matter altogether); and to Kant, whom I did not. And from there, brings us back to the arrogance of technology-based solutions to the climate crisis.

Robin takes a week off her own work to stay with Ida.

EVERYWHERE YOU GO YOU FEEL STRONGER

You dream about nuclear explosions. Now and then
you explode with longing. Someone says:
struggle. You hear: loss. Is it possible

We are into the last quarter. The finale is explosive.

After Acknowledgements is The Translator’s Note, which is not a note about difficulties with translation, but a short essay, an attempt at interpreting what Marsman has written. I would rather the text stood on its own. Collins (the translator) writes “The Opposite of a Person is ultimately a live effort to harness its various hyperobjects through language, to make climate change and love, hopelessness and fear, a reality for its readers.” Maybe. If you get the chance, read it and decide for yourself.

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Lieke Marsman, The Opposite of a Person, Daunt Books, 2022. Translated by Sophie Collins. 171pp.