The small universe – that sounds like yet another informative children’s book by André Kuipers for future space travelers. However, don’t let this new title by Annejan Mieras mislead you. Certainly, in her third book of fiction – which it is no coincidence that she gave the motto ‘in the center of everything dwells the sun’, borrowed from Copernicus – Mieras frequently refers to the universe. But in this original and stylistically strong story about the contrary but faithful Raven (10) who wants to know if you will remain the same ‘when everything around you changes’, that universe represents more than just the star-filled sky.
The changes that Raven talks about do not lie. Because of a leak in their new apartment, she and her mother suddenly moved to a dingy mobile home at camping site ‘Het Kleine Universe’. Due to the winter closure, this is ‘a ghost village of packed garden furniture and closed shutters’. Meanwhile, Raaf’s father seems to have left with the northern sun. Raaf’s mother insists that he is having ‘holdups’ with the tow truck on which he has recently started working thanks to a questionable friend. But Raven doesn’t believe her. Delays may be ‘unpredictable’, as her mother puts it dryly, but how long can it last? You can’t call him: Raven is suspended from school and her phone is still in the classroom.
Father gone
The mystery surrounding Raaf’s missing father (which cannot be further elaborated here) and the great cinematic setting of the campsite, which Mieras indeed convincingly portrays as a self-contained small universe, give the story a touch of adventure and pleasant suspense. It also increases when Raaf meets the surly son of the campsite owner and follows Nicolaas into the ‘for unauthorized persons’ camping forest. When he catches her at ‘his’ high hunting cabin, Mieras shows her sense of hypothermic humour. The scene in which Raven mistakes a telescope for a gun is hilarious and Nicolaas teasingly makes her believe in her own fantasy.
That the boy has converted the hut into his own observatory is a bit of a coincidence that puts the story motif just a bit too thick. But Mieras gets away with it. Subtle and in smooth, beautiful sentences (with playful references to Jan-Paul Schutten’s big bang book The mystery of nothing) she makes Nicolaas’ fascination for the cosmos completely palpable. Like Raven, he has to deal with a great loss. ‘Missing is a kind of universe inside’, he explains to Raven. Staring into infinity and adhering to his mother’s rule that ‘the sun in the middle holds everything together’, he tries to understand the connection of things: ‘I didn’t know I could think that far.’
Infinite emptiness
Very cleverly, Mieras allows the infinite emptiness of the universe to which Nicolaas refers to coincide unnoticed with ‘the hollow’ that has crept into Raaf’s belly since her father’s disappearance. And it is beautiful how this shared loss gives Raaf a grip on her disrupted life again. What is also comforting: the drawing that Raaf makes with her father’s old ‘Sennelier crayons for artists’ of their former house on Tomatenstraat, where she lived happily before they moved into the new apartment. She first draws the crooked tree, then the swing (which she leaves tellingly empty), and the garden gate. Mieras aptly expresses Raaf’s thoughts when the girl actually starts on the house: ‘I leave the large window downstairs open to look inside us. We disappeared us.’
Mieras ingeniously brings all those small universes of her characters together in the end, ‘so that we feel that we are all part of something big’. Mieras, the one with Homme and the emergency (2019) also showed her literary talent, wrote a rich and intelligent book that sparkles like the stars that Raaf and Nicolaas so sincerely try to reach for.
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