Chilling but familiar story of a life lost in regrets
Julia is an account of life barely experienced by a peculiarly passive man, tormented by his memories and his inability to act
It all begins with the wary arrival at a house of the home help on his day off. This helper, a man named Van Dijk, is intending the briefest of visits, just to check the ancient car, a Wolseley. It has been having engine problems. On a hot Sunday afternoon, the home help wants only to deal with the engine, not with his employer, an elderly widower. Van Dijk is not on duty, although he is well aware of being always on call for Chris Dudok, a former factory owner whose demands don’t appear to go much beyond a request for sandwiches.
The Dutch writer Otto de Kat conveys the growing unease of the visitor as he tiptoes around, reluctant to get involved yet worried in case something is wrong. The silence disturbs Van Dijk, later in the narrative acknowledged as a “dependable minder of daily existence”. It also prepares him for a discovery that, as the novel progress, leaves the reader wondering why it took so long to happen.
Julia is an account of life barely experienced by a peculiarly passive man, tormented by his memories and his inability to act. The eponymous character, although brave and independently minded, even heroic, is barely present in the action. Instead she becomes a mythic figure, alluring, unobtainable and doomed.
This brilliant slow burn of a novel begins at its narrative conclusion. De Kat then shifts the story into the past, to the time when the old man of the opening chapter was young and reluctantly being prepared to take over his father’s factory. In preparation for this, Chris Dudok travels to the northern German town of Lübeck for work experience at a firm that dealt with his father’s.
Among his colleagues is Julia, an engineer. De Kat concentrates on Chris’s interest in this daring free spirit, who wears yellow shoes. Reference is made to a girl eagerly waiting back home for Chris, a girl for whom he has no feelings. Initially the narrative lags and appears about to become yet another account of a wartime romance. Julia is a thinly developed character, outspoken in her views. The rise of the Nazis is sketched in; and, while attending a play in the local theatre, Chris watches as the leading actor refuses to join in the communal salute to Hitler.
Chris does not salute; nor does Julia, who is also in the audience. The defiant actor is arrested. He turns out to be Julia’s brother. The police question Chris and, Peter-like, he denies knowing Julia.
De Kat describes the political tensions. He is concerned with atmosphere and uses Lübeck only as a setting, choosing not to describe this most historic of cities. Various strange notes are struck. Knollenberg, the factory owner in Lübeck, entrusts Chris with Julia’s letter of dismissal. Julia’s attitude to Chris is one of fond protection. He is unusually accepting of advice. He returns to the Netherlands and marries his determined girlfriend. His only condition appears to be that there are no children. They have none.
