Some people are always on the lookout for The Great American Novel. Others of us — not so numerous, admittedly — have been keeping half an eye out for The Great Cheese Novel.
If you happen to fall into the latter category, then rejoice. Your moment has come! Belgian author Willem Elsschot’s 1933 comic classic, “Cheese,” is making its first appearance in English (published by Granta Books, 153 pages, $14.95) — and its cautionary tale about a would-be cheese entrepreneur whose business ends up stinking to high heaven serves perfectly as a parable for any situation in which human aspirations fall severely out of whack with human abilities.
Shipping-company clerk Frans Larmaans is the aspirer in question. Almost 50, and with “thirty years of servility” behind him, he’s ready for better things, both socially and materially. When a well-to-do friend steers him toward a contract to distribute 20 tons of Dutch Edam in Belgium and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, Frans ditches his job and waits for his “cheese dream” to come true.
But the 20 tons of cheese arrive on his doorstep before he has even set up an office or storage facility, and he has never sold a thing in his life. Indeed, he’s too shy to approach a counter clerk, let alone a store manager. Clearly Frans is in over his head. But his pride won’t let him admit it at first — especially not when he has a downtrodden wife and two skeptical teenage children to impress.
Elsschot calibrates Frans’ rise and fall exquisitely, creating just the right mix of pathos and absurdity. Disquisitions on cheese smells, plans to “mount a cheese campaign” and resolutions to “put heart and soul into cheese” soon give way to interludes of “cheese misery” and rising specters of “cheese catastrophe.”
While the story takes several unpredictable turns, its outcome is inevitable. British translator Paul Vincent does a fine job of capturing the antic-melancholy flavor of the tale, and he couches it in a playfully fussy prose that rings true to the period. He also includes a helpful preface that places Elsschot in Low Countries literary history, noting that since 1957 his work has never been out of print in Belgium and Holland.
A final bonus is a nimble essay by Elsschot himself on how, in fiction, style rather than content is the determining factor in whether a story reads as a tragedy or a comedy. It reads as freshly today as it must have 69 years ago.