Title: Cheese (original title: Kaas)
Author: Willem Elsschot
Genre: fiction
Rating:

A clerk in a dock industry is talked into a new profession: selling food and more particularly: cheese. He becomes the distributor for Belgium and Luxemburg. He always felt little and of no importance, but now he has the chance to prove himself. The only problem is, he has no idea how to be a (good) businessman and after only a few days of being a cheese expert he is forced to make a difficult decision; keep trying or go back to his old self and be happy with it.

A very Dutch book, in old Dutch spelling. This will probably be lost in the English translation and I have no idea how that will effect the story, because I read the book in Dutch. I think though the problems the main character encounters are universal; feeling unimportant in the job and as a human, wanting to change it and having a hard time doing so, with even a harder time deciding to go back to being a very small part in the world again. The process of these choices made are very well written down by Elsschot and I felt the struggles the main character had to go through. I could understand his wanting to be somebody after feeling a nobody for so long, being heard at parties where he was always ignored. I could also see that the world he got into wasn't his world at all. The differences of the two worlds were well worked out by the author. Only a very small book, but if you have the chance you should read it.

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Cheese

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