Joachim Frank’s extraordinarily engaging Aan Zee appears in many ways to be a traditionally realistic novel. It affords all the pleasures we’re accustomed to finding in realistic fiction—a complex protagonist with a supporting cast of colorful characters, vivid settings, a plot with twists and turns, and a grounding of thematic material. But there’s a good deal more here—a patterning deeper than the plot and a thematic questioning of nothing less than the ontological status of our being as humans.
So, meet our protagonist Hubert Belovski, whose genealogy begins with the Big Bang and leaps forward to his present identity as a scientist of atmospheric disturbances, a close companion of wind and dust in unstable states. Thus, the grounding of Hubert’s being is unsettled from our first meeting. It is further disturbed by his discovery that there are four H. Belovskis in the International Science Citation Index. He ponders whether this is a threat to the recognition of his work or a sign that he and the other Belovskis and indeed all the other scientists cited are parts of a universal mind that might produce cosmic peacefulness.
Leaving behind a financial sponge who is perfecting the cultivation of vegetables in the shape of human heads; his beloved cat Sunshine, a music lover and aficionado of Hesse’s Steppenwolf; and memories of his ex-wife, Hubert journeys to the Scheveningen district of The Hague to attend a conference on fluid dynamics. There he will stay near the beach in the seedy hotel Aan Zee, destined to become the central metaphor of the novel on several levels. Of immediate importance are its labyrinthine halls, its rooms of slyly changing configuration, a churlish staff, and a frantic gull that makes a noise outside the window at once clamorous and prophetic.
Now we will meet the three central women of the novel—Helga, an old girlfriend of Hubert’s vacationing near the Aan Zee at a nudist colony; Hubert’s Aunt Frieda, who lives in a small Alpine village in Austria and takes care of Hubert during an extended convalescence; and Ilana, a hired dancer-cum-prostitute. The first of these provides Hubert the gift of sexual awakening; the second brings affectionate care and small-town oppression; the third a bit more than a whiff of the forbidden and subsequent disgrace. Of these Helga is the most fully realized, a woman who likes to stick to the here and now, or as the narrator puts it, “She was one of those people who dwells in the armpits of the zeitgeist.” It’s no wonder, then, that when Hubert takes Helga to an avant-garde performance that features a fire marshal who preempts the entire show Helga is not entranced.
The climax of the novel and the completion of its full circle comes when Hubert returns from Aunt Frieda’s to Scheveningen and the Aan Zee. The transformations he encounters there, the personages he meets, and the vision he experiences will take the reader deep into the question of our communal being.
What remains to be said is that the author, winner of a 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and a dedicated fictionist over many years, brings to this work two finely honed sensibilities that straddle the Cartesian gap between body and mind. Hubert as a skeptical scientist must confront the possibility that he is nothing more than a granule in a stream of particles. On the other hand, his body and his emotions are capable of giving him both great pain and great joy. Does Frank bridge the gap and solve the problem of the split in our human identity? Of course not. The phrase that appears early and reappears at the end as a kind of philosophical motif of linguistic confusion is the Dutch kannitverstahn, can’t understand. It serves as a convenient encapsulation but cannot do justice to the novel’s profound investigation of the mystery of what we are.
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