Twee minuten stilte
Twee minuten stilte ("Two minutes' silence") is a novel by Dutch academic, writer, and essayist Karel van het Reve.
A barely disguised roman à clef, many of its characters are based on colleagues and friends of the author, and the novel criticizes an academic system full of meaningless formalities and historiography as practiced by Soviet scholars and their Western sympathizers.
Van het Reve (a scholar of Russian literature and Soviet and Communist studies) enjoyed the genre of the detective novel, and many references to it are found in his work.
Prins is a scholar of Slobodian language and culture – this is intended to be a Slavic language, and Van het Reve (a professor of Slavic literature) constructed a plot whose Soviet allegory is only thinly veiled: Slobodia is the Soviet Union, the country's newspaper is called Krivda ("lie"), rather than Pravda ("truth"), one of the magazines mentioned in the book is Duszegubinsk, resembling a Russian word for murderer, and Slobodia's capital is called Rabsk, related to the Russian word for "slavish".
[2] Van het Reve (who, while a scholar of Slavic studies, is praised more for his essayistic contributions to polemics[3]) used various characters and events in Twee minuten stilte to satirize academic life.
[2] Lodewijk Prins, a librarian at the Institute for Eastern European Social History in Amsterdam and the first-person narrator of the novel, returns home after spending a year studying in the United States on a scholarship from the Chevrolet foundation.
His colleague, Peter Struve (who is about to defend his thesis and receive his doctorate), explains all the events that have taken place: Van Bever was killed during the two minutes of silence at 8 pm on 4 May, the Remembrance of the Dead, just before an unusual meeting he had called himself.
Prins suspects the murder has been committed by an agent of the Slobodian regime, and alters a message to make it say that the letters are to be exchanged the next day; right after Struve's dissertation defense and promotion, they are to be placed on a table so the other party can retrieve them.
His death was accidental: Struve, on his way to the meeting, had picked up a suspicious package addressed to Van Bever and dropped it from an upper floor inside the institute in what he thought was a safe place, in order to see if it would explode.
Marsha Keja considers the published version to be rather weak, and comments that it is likely that Van het Reve simply did not care for it, and that "relativized" the idea of suspense.
One of the pieces of evidence she cites is that while the reader is waiting for the denouement, the narrator slows down for a few pages to describe how he regained consciousness after being knocked down – ending with a few sentences on the "where am I?"
This caused confusion among later readers (who bought the book second-hand, or found it in an old collection), some of whom thought they had accidentally come across a real letter, and returned it to Van het Reve.
The story behind it was unearthed (years after Van het Reve's death) by Arjan Visser, a journalist for the Dutch daily Trouw.
[9] Still, in 2004, Hans Renders, critiquing a biography of the author in Vrij Nederland, asked whether it would not have been interesting if the biographer had dived into the supposed real event behind the novel.
