Book Review: "R. v. R."

A decade or so ago there was one of those greatest of commercial enterprises, a genuine used book store, right here in the local county seat, a town  officially populated by less than 500 people.  But that salutary time didn't last long.  After a few years the proprietor yielded to the lure of the big money, and he moved his business, already a long 14 miles from here, another 25 years farther north, to the much greener pastures, dollar-wise, in the college town of Charlottesville.  

But before that happened (which, by the way, added to the occasional cultural shortcomings in this area that have long been  typified by the absence of pistachio ice cream in any store that supposedly sells food, as far in any direction as a small Cessna can comfortably fly), I was lucky enough to happen across a thick, yellowed hardcover titled, "R.v.R.: the Life and Times of Rembrandt van Rijn."   It had been published in 1930, and its flyleaf bore the distinguished-looking and -sounding signature of some lady, with a date of the following year, the same year that I was born.

Every night I have been reading myself to sleep with this book.   It is the third time I've read it, and each time I get more out of it than I did the time before.

That's partly because of the somewhat weird way that the book is written, which might offend some literary purists.  

The author was Hendrik Willem van Loon, a Dutchman, and he presents it as the diary of one of his great-gteat-grandfathers nine times removed, Joannis van Loon , a medical man and the closest friend of the famous painter.   As such the book is extremely diffuse, and it is, if anything, even more the biography of that van Loon ancestor than it is of Rembrandt.  But the author makes no apology for himself or for his purported grandfather for the monumental digressions, and that's fine with me, as any reader of this weblog would expect.   There's nothing wrong with some healthy digression.

No one,  then, should be surprised if  a bunch of things suggested by this book should pop up in this weblog, because "R.v.R" discusses and gives interesting insights on a wide range of subjects and issues that are still very much alive today. 

Meanwhile it looks like I stumbled into getting a collector's first edition, though I am a little surprised to see that copies of  this book are still widely available today, though it is probably totally unknown in the painting world, just as are the huge majority of the most fabulous writings of any genre

  And also meanwhile I wonder about the author's proposition, too.   The language in it is somehow too ...today and only barely what I would expect to be the idiom of three and a half centuries ago, and of the Dutch moreover, and that's compounded by the fact that the book is already nearly 80 years old

I think the authors of the Rembrandt volume in the excellent Time-Life cycle of lives of the artists about 20 years ago would be wondering, too, in light of this statement by them:  

With one or two notable exceptions the Dutch have not produced poets, playwrights, novelists, letter-writers, or critics of the first rank.  They prefer to act and wordlessly to contemplate, not to involve themselves in comment or analysis, and thus during the golden century of their art they made only sparse notes about their greatest painters.

 That said, "R.v.R." is a  huge exception.