ABSTRACT

Remco Campert (b.1928) is a versatile Dutch writer who is best known for his short stories. He is fond of playing with language for comic effect. At first sight, his stories seem to be a simple reporting of his observations, but as soon as you read more closely you notice the comic side of his usage. His language is a literary rendering of the ways people in the Netherlands and Belgium sometimes treat their spoken language: they narrate things where the main point is not necessarily the content itself, but rather word usage or stylistic levels, sometimes mixing them. What is uppermost is thus not so much what a story is about as the way in which it is told. The three stories below appeared as columns in the daily newspaper De Volkskrant. These daily vignettes are written in turn by Remco Campert and Jan Mulder under the collective name CAMU. Each year a collection of the best ones is published by De Bezige Bij.