The Evenings by Gerard Reve

Backlisted

Backlisted Podcast

Arts, Books, Leisure, Hobbies

4.7 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 24 May 2021

⏱️ 73 minutes

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Summary

Joining John and Andy this week are novelist Marie Phillips (Gods Behaving Badly, Oh, I Do Like To Be...) and novelist, screenwriter and poet Joe Dunthorne (Submarine, O Positive). The book we are discussing is Gerard Reve's debut novel De Avonden AKA The Evenings, which caused a sensation when published in the Netherlands in 1947 and is now considered a classic. In the words of Herman Koch, it may be 'the funniest, most exhilarating novel about boredom ever written'. Reve was only 24; he went on to have a long, successful and frequently scandalous career but only a handful of his books have been translated into English. Also in this episode John digs Bella Bathurst's new book Field Work: What Land Does to People & What People Do to Land and Andy surveys Landscapes of Detectorists and discovers prose to treasure. Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length) 10:26 - Landscapes of Detectorists by Innes M. Keighren & Joanna Northcup 16:29 - Field Work: What Land Does to People & What People Do to Land by Bella Bathurst 22:07 - The Evenings by Gerard Reve *To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops *For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	So this is the little bit of informal chat at the beginning and I'm Nicky could almost
0:28.4	she can fade herself up telling us this story. How did this come about, Nicky Birch? What is the
0:33.9	particular strange alignment of stars and circumstances that brought this episode about?
0:39.7	It's slightly embarrassed to say. Go on. Do it. Well, you know how some people go to book clubs.
0:49.4	Yeah, well, I've heard. As soon as, and this is the truth, as soon as we could,
0:58.3	right, Joe, as soon as the law enabled us to gather, the first thing that Joe and I did
1:08.0	was go to a podcast club. A podcast club, what's that? It's a bit like book club.
1:14.9	Well, you sit around listening to a podcast. No, you listen to the podcast in advance,
1:19.2	and then you talk about them. Oh, my God. Oh, God says Andy. That's terrible. It's actually
1:29.2	really good. We went to our podcast club, which was in the, we wasn't even a garden. It's a
1:37.2	roof garden of a mutual friend's house. And it was literally the first event. And I didn't
1:46.8	know about you, Joe, but I was very, I had been working all day. I was probably working,
1:52.0	probably producing and backlisted anyway. And I'd like worked up until the points of leaving.
1:58.5	And I turned up at this podcast club completely empty handed, but only with one thing, my swimming
2:04.8	costume, because I've been told that I had a hot tub. Yeah, which she'd bought as a lock down
2:15.7	treat to herself as I understand. And it was tiny, wasn't it? That was a bit. So I climbed
2:22.8	into this hot tub. And all of a sudden, Joe and I are sitting next to each other, knees knocking,
2:28.3	drinking drinking wine in a hot tub. It was pretty awesome. It was pretty awesome. So we started
2:34.4	talking and after about what half an hour told me wrote books. And then we realized that all
2:42.4	networking should be done in a hot tub. Yes, Andy. And low a, a backlisted episode was born out of
2:50.9	the hot tub. This is actually how all backlisted episodes come together. I have never knowingly
2:59.6	been in a hot tub, but I was on Twitter a few weeks ago. And I saw that the author, Marie Phillips,
	...

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