VPRO are doing a re-run of the serialized version of Ineke Houtman’s adaptation of Guus Kuijers’s final “Madelief” novel. The novel is great already, as the culmination of the “Madelief” series, that follows the development of Madelief (Daisy) from toddler to almost adult. Dutch children’s literature is literature in its own right and writers like Ted van Lieshout, Toon Tellegen, Joke van Leeuwen, and of course Guus Kuijer have produced work that is of exceptionally high quality. “Markings” pulls together the strands of the preceding novels: when Madelief’s grandmother dies, she stays with her grandfather to keep him company. She realises that her mother doesn’t seem too upset at her own mother’s death. It is as if no one knows her grandmother except as a stern and bitter presence who relentlessly cleaned the house and bullied her husband. Madelief begins the search for her grandmother and pieces together her life bit bit. She discovers her grandmother’s independent spirit that was stifled by the time in which she was young. In the summerhouse Madelief’s grandfather built for his wife as a place of solitude and respite, she discovers the “markings” of her grandmother’s inner life: a crude drawing of a prison window scratched into the table top, “with a face behind it”, the english course she was following, in order to be able to escape abroad, and bits of angry dialogue with her husband she accidentally recorded. Madelief also discovers why it is that her own mother and her uncle avoided contact with her mother, why they can’t bring themselves to console their father in his loss. Acting as her grandmother’s “voice”, it is she who at last brings about the beginnings of reconciliation and healing. Kuijer is brilliant at writing children’s dialogue and, as always, records and describes with a minimum of words and with a wry, ironic tone. It is a sign of true genius in youth literature to be able to write at a simple level about the real issues that every human life revolves around: the relationships between loved ones and between parents and children. Kuijer presents his characters warts and all. He does not judge, and gently portrays Madelief, the near-adult who continues to ask questions, observing with amazement the mess that grownups make. Even when she is well aware the questions are awkward.
The film, by Ineke Houtman is very much true to the spirit of the novel: actors are excellent and Madelief is played by the same Madelief Verelst who played the character in the serialization (from the late 1980s) of the “early” Madelief books. Sunday mornings, on ZAPP.