The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Cheese by Willem Elsschot
Susan Smith Nash

Willem Elsschot. Cheese. Trans. and preface Paul Vincent. Granta, 2002. 134 pp. $14.95.

Willem Elsschot wrote and published Cheese in 1933. An immediate success in Dutch-speaking countries, Cheese is a novella that satirizes the world of business while skewering the pretensions and pecking-orders of businessmen and their families. Frans Laarmans is a low-level shipping-clerk who has worked for thirty years for the General Marine and Shipbuilding Company. He is the quintessential low-level functionary, eager for upward mobility yet mired in the small world he has inhabited for years. When the opportunity presents itself to become the “sole representative for Belgium and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg” for Edam cheese, he cannot say no, even though he knows nothing about the cheese-retail business. In fact, he doesn’t even eat the stuff. Nevertheless, Laarmans takes delivery of “nearly ten thousand cheeses, each weighing approximately two kilos, packed in 370 patent boxes.” What follows is an often hilarious saga of a newly minted entrepreneur whose deadpan grandiosity is juxtaposed with an absolute absence of self-awareness. After announcing to himself, “now the cheese world is mine for the taking,” he ramps up his startup business, following all the protocols and procedures of a global trading company. Never mind that he is officing out of his home in a room the size of a pantry. He also allows himself to become completely absorbed in bureaucratic details, whiling away several weeks as he searches for just the right desk in a secondhand shop or debating the best way to sort and tag 164 job applications. Elsschot’s narrative derives a great deal of humor by means of absurd juxtapositions and exaggerations. The motif of grotesquely outsized proportions repeats throughout the book. Ironically, Laarmans is hyperaware of proportions and wishes to keep everything “in order” and well regulated. It is a satisfying read, with deft humor and technique. [Susan Smith Nash]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Cheese by Willem Elsschot Susan Smith Nash Willem Elsschot. Cheese. Trans. and preface Paul Vincent. Granta, 2002. 134 pp. $14.95. Willem Elsschot wrote and published Cheese in 1933. An immediate success in Dutch-speaking countries, Cheese is a novella that satirizes the world of business while skewering the pretensions and pecking-orders of businessmen and their families. Frans Laarmans is a low-level shipping-clerk who has worked for thirty years for the General Marine and Shipbuilding Company. He is the quintessential low-level functionary, eager for upward mobility yet mired in the small world he has inhabited for years. When the opportunity presents itself to become the “sole representative for Belgium and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg” for Edam cheese, he cannot say no, even though he knows nothing about the cheese-retail business. In fact, he doesn’t even eat the stuff. Nevertheless, Laarmans takes delivery of “nearly ten thousand cheeses, each weighing approximately two kilos, packed in 370 patent boxes.” What follows is an often hilarious saga of a newly minted entrepreneur whose deadpan grandiosity is juxtaposed with an absolute absence of self-awareness. After announcing to himself, “now the cheese world is mine for the taking,” he ramps up his startup business, following all the protocols and procedures of a global trading company. Never mind that he is officing out of his home in a room the size of a pantry. He also allows himself to become completely absorbed in bureaucratic details, whiling away several weeks as he searches for just the right desk in a secondhand shop or debating the best way to sort and tag 164 job applications. Elsschot’s narrative derives a great deal of humor by means of absurd juxtapositions and exaggerations. The motif of grotesquely outsized proportions repeats throughout the book. Ironically, Laarmans is hyperaware of proportions and wishes to keep everything “in order” and well regulated. It is a satisfying read, with deft humor and technique. [Susan Smith Nash]

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