Depth at the Surface of Life: A Review of A.L. Snijders’ Night Train
In her story “On the Train,” Lydia Davis describes a trip in which she and another passenger “are united, he and I, though strangers, against the two women in front of us talking so steadily and audibly across the aisle to each other. Bad manners.” The story, totaling nine sentences, evokes the camaraderie that emerges when strangers share a private moment, when two separate narratives collide. This is a fitting introduction for Davis’ newest translation endeavor, Night Train, by Dutch author A.L. Snijders. In the process of translating the book, Davis has found in Snijders a companion on a new train, a stranger with whom to bump shoulders, and by so doing, has given us a window into his world.
Night Train is deceptively simple and totally delightful. Published by New Directions in October, the book is a collection of zkvs, or “zeer korte verhalen,” a term coined by Snijders that means “very short stories.” These are stories of daily life—encounters with animals on his farm in the Netherlands, philosophical musings, fragmented “autobiographical mini-fables”—all contained in a few sentences, not unlike the writing Lydia Davis has been praised for.
On the surface, these stories are simple, even sweet observations, like the seagulls that steal the narrator’s sandwich when he is not looking in “Human and Animal,” or the dogs who meander in and out of his life because he won’t say no to a stray in “Christmas Present.” However straightforward these stories seem, they contain subtle spiritual and literary depths that enrich and broaden the circumference of our English canon.
Many of Snijder’s zkvs share a meta-fictional quality. His language is often about its own making: how a narrative comes into being, how a word is formed. “Shoe,” for instance, is about the nature of the zkvs themselves, how their content fits their form like a shoe. When a zkvs goes wrong “it… pinches a little, the content is (slightly) larger than the form. The difference must not be too great, no binding, no mutilation.” Snijders tells us his weakness in school—that he was “too lapidary”—became his great strength in writing: “I believe I looked up that word, short, pithy, texts hewn from stone, lapis/stone.” He displays his interest in language, how a single word contains an elaborate, physical history, glinting with the celestial blue hues of a precious stone. His zkvs are similarly compact: “I made a virtue of necessity, I began to write very short stories and noticed that brevity could be 1) technical in nature—few conjunctions, little explanation, trust in the reader’s autonomous cerebration—and 2) substantive.” The metaphorical toe of Snijder’s stories has ample breathing room; he leaves plenty of space for the “reader’s autonomous cerebration.”
Indeed, the thing that makes Snijder’s stories seem so simple—their absence of dogmatic judgment—is also the core of his worldview and spiritual depth. Oftentimes in Night Train, he is surrounded by religious figures or places (many of the stories in the collection involve anecdotes about teaching at a Catholic school or quotes from the Bible, and in one he searches fruitlessly for an old Synagogue). In “Message,” where is he “driving in the car with [his] vegetarians,” he sees a cat on the side of the road and honks, which saves the cat’s life. He concludes: “The vegetarians haven’t noticed anything. The Christians also don’t notice that I love my neighbor, to say nothing of the [Muslims]. I myself say nothing about it, because I live without messages.” There is playful acceptance with which he welcomes, tracks, and writes the motions of the world. For Snijders, no conclusion is necessary, for the means and the ends are one and the same.
Snijder’s spiritual impulse best resembles someone like Zhuangzi, whose Daoist fables are not didactic but narrative, indirect, and humorous. None of the meaning in Zhuangzi comes from moral judgment or dogma, but from a fluid relationship to the world, and an admission of the “limits of language and thought.” Language, for Snijders, like for Zhuangzi, is not a trap for definite truths but more of a mirror, reflecting what exists. In “Mole,” the story of a mole living in his garden, Snijders says, “The mole has probably come to symbolize, for me, what can never be understood—and what you therefore do not have to attempt to trap.” His stories suggest to the reader that there is value in paying close attention, depth to be found on the surface of life; the presence of an ethics where final judgments have no place.
With the same precision as he observes the world, he records the motions of his mind, which do not act in accordance with narrative structures. Tangents, dreams, memories, strangers, and animals interrupt, taking the reader on detours that end miles from where they begin. In “Baker’s Wife,” he writes, “This morning I wanted to write something about the baker’s wife but she didn’t want that, I couldn’t get the first sentence down on paper. In such cases a little bike ride sometimes helps.” By the end of the story, he concludes, “The result of my little ten-kilometer bike ride was that I forgot about the baker’s wife, but I realized it only this afternoon when I bought a loaf of bread.” What you think at first is going to be about the baker’s wife, turns out to be about the absence of a subject, about relinquishing force, about welcoming stories to unfold in the ways they see fit.
In line with this discursive mode, time works more in accordance with the logic of memory than chronological storytelling. He is like Alice peering down into the rabbit hole, leaping, unconcerned if he will ever come back. “Time is like wax in my hands,” he writes in another story, and you feel its infirmity, bringing you along its tunnels of memory, speculation. In one instance, he is searching for his glass eye, and then we realize—along with him—no, he doesn’t have a glass eye. This is, in fact, a dream.
The meandering nature of the zkvs means that Snijders’ philosophical and literary reflections are often interrupted by chance encounters—by strangers on trains, memories, friends he meets in the woods, a poem that comes to mind, a bowl dropping on the head of a child (as it does to his grandson)—that he welcomes with playful acceptance. “I am very fond of chance,” he writes. He doesn’t need a broad theory to unite everything. He is happy with coincidence. As he puts it, it’s important to “leave room for imagination.”
It seems appropriate, then, that Lydia Davis’s translation of Night Train was almost entirely coincidental. The project, she writes in her introduction, is not a product of her affinity for A.L. Snijders, but rather “born of the notion of reciprocity.” Someone translated her work to Dutch, so she thought she’d find a Dutch author to translate too. Davis, a notorious polyglot and eminent microfiction writer in her own right, did not even know the language when she embarked on the project. She outlines in her introduction the very piecemeal process—combining her existing knowledge of German, English, and French—of decoding the Dutch. Her introduction resembles Snijders’ own zkvs, as both share a concern with the process of meaning-making, etymology, and a love of words. In one passage, Davis describes decoding the phrase komkommertijd. She writes:
I knew that tijd meant “time,” as our cognate “tide,” also did, back in the sixteenth century. I imagined, of course, that kon and kommer had something to do with “come”: Perhaps in the Netherlands, it was “come-comer time”; anyone might come by and take up some of his time, his time was available for whatever might come along. No, in fact it meant “cucumber time,” late in the summer when the cucumbers are ripening and people are less busy, or away.
This description is very much in the whimsical, homegrown spirit of A.L. Snijders; how the small story unfolds and suddenly twists, its concluding note of self-deprecation mixed with whimsy, and its concern over how language comes to be. Both Snijders and Davis revel in the strange boundaries between dialects; in one story, Snijders, who might as well be writing of Davis, writes of a Scottish friend visiting the Netherlands: “When he doesn’t know a word, he has recourse to the Scottish, as a result of which there arises a language which strict grammarians would scorn but which to my great pleasure they can’t.” Snijders and Davis share in their delight over the mystery of etymology, of how language is truly an amalgam of laws, culture, and unpredictable evolution. Words are beasts in their own right, that—like the cows across the street from Davis’s house—make unexpected noises; that—like the sheep in Snijders’ stories—try to run away; or like the bat hidden in the crannies of Snijders’ house.
Part of the love of language, for Snijders, is the love of sharing Dutch language and culture. He has accumulated numerous literary awards, published in the most eminent newspapers in Flanders, given readings, and written over 3,000 stories. And yet, Davis writes in her introduction, that he “apparently placed as much importance on publication in the local paper [distribution 500 readers] as in one of his other outlets, De Standard, one of Flander’s most important newspapers [500,000 readers].” Reading his zkvs, one imagines Snijders doesn’t need very many listeners; it is the act of sharing that gives him pleasure. In one story he writes of a reading: “If there had been, among the visitors a woman who clearly hated me and with a white, contorted face called out every fifteen minutes… that I had unjustly encroached upon the terrain of literature, the evening would have been spoiled for me. But this woman was absent, I had a pleasant evening, and at eleven o’clock drove home contented through the dark woods.” As long as there is an absence of malice, Snijders would be happy to continue reading on, regardless of whether the audience existed there. His stories are like the beginning of a conversation. This is what I see, he says. What do you make of it? And with Davis’ translation, the scope of possible conversations has vastly widened.
Lydia Davis is the author of Essays One, a collection of essays on writing, reading, art, memory, and the Bible. She is also the author of The End of the Story: A Novel and many story collections, including Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction; Can’t and Won’t (2014); and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, described by James Wood in The New Yorker as “a grand cumulative achievement.” Davis is also the acclaimed translator of Swann’s Way and Madame Bovary, both awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and of many other works of literature. She has been named both a Chevalier and an Officier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government, and in 2020 she received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.
A. L. Snijders (b. 1937) has become a master of “zkvs” (“zeer korte verhalen” or “very short stories”—a term he invented). In 2010 he was awarded the Constantijn Huygens Prize, one of the most important literary prizes in Holland, in recognition of his work as a whole and especially his “zkvs.”
Emma Heath is a teacher and freelance writer based in California. She is earning her M.A. at Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English and earned her B.A. in English Literature at Stanford. She is a Contributing Writer for the Cleveland Review of Books and has written for the Chicago Review of Books, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications. She loves Katherine Mansfield, crunchy peanut butter, and the Oxford comma. Follow her @emmabheath on Twitter or read her microfiction @emptybrackets on Instagram.