In 1988, in the small Flemish village of Bovenmeer, only three children are born. Laurens, Pim, and Eva, the “three musketeers”, do everything together. Fast forward to 2016. Not having spoken to him in years, Eva is driving to a party hosted by Pim. In her boot is a massive block of ice. It is the first day of winter and unusually dark and cold. It will be a long while yet before the ice melts. She has all the time in the world to take her revenge...
A grim atmosphere hangs over the opening pages of The Melting. Originally published in Dutch in 2016, an English translation by Kristen Gehrman appeared in 2021. The story is told in two alternating sets of chapters. The first takes place in 2016, on the day Eva drives to Pim’s party. The second takes place over the fateful summer of 2002, recounting the final months before the three friends go to different high schools and part ways forever.
Split has a plain, no-nonsense style of writing. Peppered throughout are curious and often grotesque observations. Storm clouds “merge like a bruise forming in reverse.” An old Mickey Mouse clock in an abandoned milking shed has frozen hands: “He stands there stiffly, the big hand on eleven and the little hand on two, cheering unconvincingly.” (297) Waiting in her childhood home, Eva observes the blinking digital clock on the microwave. “The dots used to remind me of eyes. As long as they were watching, everything remained the same. But as soon as they blinked, as soon as time closed its eyes for a split second, that’s when we got older, that’s when it hit us.” (161)
That these mundane details are laden with oppressive imagery makes it obvious that something terrible either is or has happened to Eva. She explains her photographic recall of these things as a kind of defence mechanism: “What I remember about those summer days is that every single moment mattered... It seemed important to take note of all the details so I could forget them later, so I could wipe away the memories bit by bit.” (395)
You can even see a bit of the obsessive-compulsive in this, the same mental disorder afflicting her little sister Tessie. In 2002, Tessie’s habits are growing more bizarre and elaborate. She plays Monopoly with herself, always keeping the score in a book. Every time she walks past the old disused family computer, she has to type in a few paragraphs on the keyboard. And she has an elaborate, hour-long bedtime ritual, which Eva must perform correctly, lest she begin all over again.
For reasons that are never really explained, their parents are alcoholics and hate each other. During Christmas gourmetten1—the last time the family is together—they quarrel, and their father moves their mother’s plate next to the dog bowl; he passes out on the seat and the family never makes it to midnight mass. Their mother gets her own back later, erasing dad’s place at the dinner table by pushing it against the wall.
In a particularly dark scene, Eva follows her Dad into his workshop, where he talks about his various tools and projects. “The average drill will only be used for about eleven minutes in its entire lifetime,” he says, before moving onto a noose he has hung from the rafters. It has to be tied in a certain way, he explains: “With the wrong knot, you’d suffer. You don’t want me to suffer, do you?” (6-7) Later Eva pushes past the noose while fumbling around the workshop; it is no longer menacing, just annoying, another one of dad’s unfinished home projects.
Eva and Tessie seem to understand each other on an unspoken level. They are drawn to each other out of sisterly love, but also because they have no-one else. Their older brother Jolan prefers to withdraw into his insect collection. Pip and Laurens, meanwhile, growing more aware of their sexuality, embark on increasingly risky pubescent adventures, leaving Eva to cope alone with her changing body. Her only participation is to serve as the boys’ riddle-master for a dicey game they play with all the girls in town: each girl must attempt to answer the riddle, but for every wrong guess, they remove a piece of clothing.
At first, Spit hides the riddle from us. Only as the stakes of the game get higher does its connection with events in 2016 become apparent. Eva is in fact revising her role as riddle-master: we have to guess what the purpose of her ice block is. Only 300 pages into the book does it become obvious. At this point the book becomes immensely captivating; I read the last hundred pages or so in one go. Yet not all the plot-threads came together to my satisfaction. The promise that we’ll somehow connect the events of Summer 2002 with the ice-block is what pulls us through the book’s frustratingly glacial pace, but Tessie’s mental problems and the mysterious death of Pim’s brother, by the time they’re wound up, are basically incongruous to the main story.
Much of this book’s progression takes place through conspicuous omission. There’s a riddle, but we don’t know what it is. There’s an ice block, but we don’t know why. Pim’s brother died, but nobody says how. Like an unhappy marriage, or the buried secrets of an insular village, the traumas boil away beneath the surface until they become too painful to suppress any longer. In telling her story through omission, Eva resembles Bovenmeer: unwilling—perhaps incapable—of talking about its unhappy things directly.
Her actions in the present day are shocking in their own right, but they have an added symbolism that makes sense only to Pip and Laurens. She is able to get back at them without having to say anything. When Eva conjures her childhood traumas in all these trivial details and episodes, she also inducts us into the rhythms of her village. Unwilling to divulge its secrets, Bovenmeer will give them up only if we learn its smouldering enmities and pitiless rumours. Only then do Eva’s actions make sense.
The book’s brilliance is its self-similarity on multiple levels. It resembles Eva’s block of ice: by the time everything falls into place, and we start imagining how she might find a way out, it is too late. Eva would love to expose everything that happened, to set the record straight and get back at everyone who wronged her. But there’s an equal futility to her actions, to the story she is telling and the doom that tails it from the opening pages. When the block of ice melts, a million careful details won’t matter anymore: “... whether it was eleven or twelve o’clock when I walked out of the house I grew up in... All that will matter is that I was here, on this first snowy day of an otherwise mild winter.” (405)
Gourmetten is a Dutch and Flemish Christmas tradition. It is a meal where everyone cooks their own food (little bits of meat and vegetables) on a griddle in the centre of the table.