“If this novel gets torn to shreds, I’ll quit writing immediately”, Frank Nellen told Observant in 2019 after the publication of his debut novel, Land van dadels en prinsen. It didn’t get torn to shreds, and he didn’t quit – and it’s a good thing he didn’t, we can say after reading his sophomore novel, De onzichtbaren. Where the first one received a cautiously positive reception, the reviews of his second book are glowing. And, spoiler alert, rightly so. Nellen, an associate professor of VAT and Customs Law at UM and tax consultant at Baker Tilly, has proved himself a born storyteller.
He tells us the story of Dani, who grows up in a Ukrainian village in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It’s the kind of village where things are the way they are because that’s just the way it is – until one day a new boy arrives. Pavel is different, he stands out, and not just because he has only one eye. No, Pavel stands out because he reads books, openly resists their tyrannical schoolteacher and likes to tell his friends stories. Despite his young age, he possesses “the ability to transport you to other times and worlds with a handful of words. His voice breathed life into the people you met there. He pulled their souls from oblivion and let you look them in the eye. You truly found yourself in a coal mine, or a snowy plain strewn with corpses and snow-covered cannons – far from the clutches of our everyday existence”.
While Pavel soon moves on to boarding school and university, the village boys are condemned to a bleak life of mind-numbing work in a run-down light bulb factory. Nellen vividly portrays the dreary tedium of everyday life under Soviet rule, as well as Dani and his friends’ desperate attempts to escape its meaninglessness through alcohol, affairs and cynicism – routes that all prove equally cheap and futile.
But the novel is about more than just the small stories of the “invisibles”. Beyond the lives of factory worker Dani and intellectual Pavel looms the larger narrative of real-world communism as it loses its enchanting effect on people, unravels and eventually crumbles. This becomes tangible in the scene where a bust of Lenin, dropped by Pavel, shatters on the library floor. “It turned out to be made of plaster – not marble or alabaster, and not concrete, that primordial substance of socialism. There it was, the invincibility of the father of the Union reduced to a fable, a lie from a bygone era – emphasised by the cheap material from which he had been cast.”
As noted in other reviews, De onzichtbaren is pregnant with relevance. Vladimir Putin’s nostalgia for the era of the larger Soviet Union that included Ukraine is well known. But perhaps even more so, the book is pregnant with a past that deserves retelling regardless of Putin. It says a lot that the author and publisher felt the need to explain who Josef Stalin was in the book’s list of names and terms. In this way, Frank Nellen’s latest novel is both well timed and timeless. Let yourself be told this story; you won’t regret it.