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ISBN 978-1-9370-79-7 (paperback) University Press of the South, published on October 25, 2019
Published as e-book on 24 international platforms by International University Presses on June 16, 2020
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SYNOPSIS OF AAN ZEE:
This novel is about the tragic-comic search of a man for his identity between two cultures. It is a modern bildungsroman, in the sense that the hero searches for a purpose and is transformed in the process. Hubert Belovski, a German-born scientist now living in the USA, is confronted with his past in the shape of a former girlfriend, as he goes to Scheveningen in the Netherlands, following an invitation to speak at a conference on fluid dynamics. Aan Zee is the name of his hotel, which has seen better days. After a brief rekindling of passion, he is feeling more alone than before. What follows is a journey to Austria where he visits his aunt and gets trapped in a little village in the Alps for almost a year. It is here, in a bizarre setting, where he reflects on his life. He finally escapes, and in Rip van Winkle fashion, returns into a world that has moved on.
CONTENT OF AAN ZEE:
[SPOLER ALERT!]
Hubert Belovski, a German-born scientist now living in the States, is confronted with his past as he goes to Holland following an invitation to speak at a Conference on Fluid Dynamics. Turbulence and Chaos Theory are terms in his field of science that apply equally well to his emotional life that has suffered since his divorce. Eric, his best friend, who has been confined to a wheelchair because of a childhood disease, wishes him well for the trip. In a sense, Hubert is Eric’s alter ego, and it seems to him as though he’d be traveling in his friend’s place. Eric pursues an unusual and risky type of business: he has found a way to grow gourds into molds so that they assume the likeness of famous persons, such as Abraham Lincoln and Greta Garbo. The reports on the progress of his gourd farm (which Hubert also has invested in, being a good sport) and its eventual failure fill some of the correspondence between the two friends while Hubert is in Europe. “Aan Zee” is the name of a mysterious, run-down hotel in Scheveningen where Hubert is staying — it has qualities that remind him of his childhood. In one of his dreams, his diseased parents actually occupy one of the rooms. Hubert’s curiosity about a nearby nudist colony is repaid, unexpectedly, when he runs into Helga, his former girlfriend, who spends her vacation there. Hubert and Helga’s relationship is rekindled but the two lovers have entirely different esthetic concepts and outlooks on their lives, which come to a clash when they attend an artsy performance at the local theater. Victor, his former classmate and long-time friend, happens to pass by on a business trip. The two friends meet for a night in some of the local bars to reminisce about the past. After Helga breaks up with him again, Hubert, despondent, decides to visit his Aunt Frieda in Tyrol. During the long train ride across Europe, Hubert develops a mysterious viral illness that affects his spine and leaves him paralyzed. His aunt welcomes him and nurses him without complaining. Shocked, and slowly realizing that he has become a literal mirror image of his friend in the States, Hubert tries to adjust to his new condition. As if in a mockery of his illness, a surfboard arrives in his new domicile, forwarded from Scheveningen where he’d entered a benefit raffle while still with Helga. In one of his acts of defiance, Hubert hires a nude dancer to perform for him while his aunt is away on a day-long shopping trip to a nearby town. In Hubert, extreme anger and despair mix with a reluctant acceptance of his fate. Belatedly, he begins to value the compassion with which the little village has greeted him. The book closes with Hubert making a slow recovery. Dazed, he looks back and tries to make sense of his life.
WHERE TO BUY AAN ZEE:
- The book is available as softcover on Amazon.
- It is also now available as e-book on 24 international platforms including Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Nobles Nook.
- It has been re-issued in Europe on June 20, 2021. Here are Links for Online Ordering Worldwide.
- It has been re-issued on December 20, 2021 with a new cover, following the stipulation by wholesalers that AAN ZEE, meaning “by the sea,” should definitely show a beach.
- This makes me think of future re-issues with covers concentrating on the different episodes, such as — spoiler alert! — the striptease by the prostitute toward the novel’s end.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF AAN ZEE:
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(foto credit: Udo Helmholz)
Joachim Frank is a scientist and writer living in New York and escaping to his house in the Berkshires. His creative work — poems, flash fiction and short stories — has been published in small press literary journals. He is the author of three other still unpublished novels, Narcis, The Observatory, and Ierapetra, or my Sister’s Keeper. He is a professor at Columbia University, New York. In 2017 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Jacques Dubochet and Richard Henderson.
Frank’s literary website (blog and links to publications) is https://www.franxfiction.com. He is listed in the Poets & Writers directory of fiction writers.
NOTES ON THE ORIGIN OF THE NOVEL AAN ZEE:
My twitter moniker says “wantstobeawriter.” Once my career path was set as a scientist, the other options narrowed a lot. Science doesn’t allow much free time. Still I was able to take writing classes and, over the years, publish a number of short stories and work on three novels.
Aan Zee is my first novel, published on October 25, 2019 by University Press of the South. I started it some 30 years ago when I took a writing class with William Kennedy in Albany, New York. In the class I read a short story I’d written about a run-down hotel in Scheveningen in The Netherlands. Kennedy, after listening to it, encouraged me and told me to go on and flesh the story out into something novel-length.
Just as the last class finished, Kennedy walked in, smiling, waving a letter in his hand — his novel “Ironweed” had just been accepted, after he’d sent the MS around to 60 publishers.
I finished Aan Zee around 1994 when I was on a Sabbatical in Heidelberg, and sent the draft around to a number of publishers — though not as many as Kennedy had with his manuscript — but I had no takers. In one of the bout of desperation every writer is familiar with I sent it to a press in England which specialized in vanity-type publications, with a large share of the costs carried by the author. They sent me a glowing assessment of the literary merits of my text, purportedly by a professional editor, which praised the novel in such excessive tones that I decided to drop the idea, out of sheer embarrassment.
The quirky story about how Aan Zee finally got published is contained in a blog I posted on November 14, 2019. It is on its own worth a short story.
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CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR AAN ZEE:
Review of the book in the blog of Eugene Garber, professor of English Literature, SUNY Albany:
[SPOILER ALERT!]
“Joachim Frank’s extraordinarily engaging Aan Zee appears in many ways to be a traditionally realistic novel. It affords all the pleasures we’re accustomed to finding in realistic fiction—a complex protagonist with a supporting cast of colorful characters, vivid settings, a plot with twists and turns, and a grounding of thematic material. But there’s a good deal more here—a patterning deeper than the plot and a thematic questioning of nothing less than the ontological status of our being as humans.
So, meet our protagonist Hubert Belovski, whose genealogy begins with the Big Bang and leaps forward to his present identity as a scientist of atmospheric disturbances, a close companion of wind and dust in unstable states. Thus, the grounding of Hubert’s being is unsettled from our first meeting. It is further disturbed by his discovery that there are four H. Belovskis in the International Science Citation Index. He ponders whether this is a threat to the recognition of his work or a sign that he and the other Belovskis and indeed all the other scientists cited are parts of a universal mind that might produce cosmic peacefulness.
Leaving behind a financial sponge who is perfecting the cultivation of vegetables in the shape of human heads; his beloved cat Sunshine, a music lover and aficionado of Hesse’s Steppenwolf; and memories of his ex-wife, Hubert journeys to the Scheveningen district of The Hague to attend a conference on fluid dynamics. There he will stay near the beach in the seedy hotel Aan Zee, destined to become the central metaphor of the novel on several levels. Of immediate importance are its labyrinthine halls, its rooms of slyly changing configuration, a churlish staff, and a frantic gull that makes a noise outside the window at once clamorous and prophetic.
Now we will meet the three central women of the novel—Helga, an old girlfriend of Hubert’s vacationing near the Aan Zee at a nudist colony; Hubert’s Aunt Frieda, who lives in a small Alpine village in Austria and takes care of Hubert during an extended convalescence; and Ilana, a hired dancer-cum-prostitute. The first of these provides Hubert the gift of sexual awakening; the second brings affectionate care and small-town oppression; the third a bit more than a whiff of the forbidden and subsequent disgrace. Of these Helga is the most fully realized, a woman who likes to stick to the here and now, or as the narrator puts it, “She was one of those people who dwells in the armpits of the zeitgeist.” It’s no wonder, then, that when Hubert takes Helga to an avant-garde performance that features a fire marshal who preempts the entire show Helga is not entranced.
The climax of the novel and the completion of its full circle comes when Hubert returns from Aunt Frieda’s to Scheveningen and the Aan Zee. The transformations he encounters there, the personages he meets, and the vision he experiences will take the reader deep into the question of our communal being.
What remains to be said is that the author, winner of a 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and a dedicated fictionist over many years, brings to this work two finely honed sensibilities that straddle the Cartesian gap between body and mind. Hubert as a skeptical scientist must confront the possibility that he is nothing more than a granule in a stream of particles. On the other hand, his body and his emotions are capable of giving him both great pain and great joy. Does Frank bridge the gap and solve the problem of the split in our human identity? Of course not. The phrase that appears early and reappears at the end as a kind of philosophical motif of linguistic confusion is the Dutch kannitverstahn, can’t understand. It serves as a convenient encapsulation but cannot do justice to the novel’s profound investigation of the mystery of what we are.”
Michael Joyce, professor emeritus for Media Studies at Vassar College (this review appears under a pseudonym on amazon’s website):
I especially loved the tour de force of turbulence of the chapter that describes a phantasmagoric railway journey to Innsbruck, wherein the protagonist Hubert, like Wallace Stevens’ “Ludwig Richter, turbulent Schlemihl/ Has lost the whole in which he was contained.” The ensuing flood of “strange days indeed,” to use John Lennon’s phrase, leave a reader vertiginously caught up in what in Finnegans Wake James Joyce wrote of as the “tubular jurbulance at a bull’s run over the assback bridge” before dropping the reader, dazed and satisfied, back on (at least momentarily) dry land.”
Suresh Raval, professor of English at the University of Arizona (his review appeared in the September 2020 issue of OFFCOURSE magazine):
[SPOILER ALERT!]
“This is a novel about a scientist Hubert Belovsky, born in Germany and brought up and educated in the U.S.A., who is invited to give a talk in The Hague at a conference in his field. Divorced for a few years he has been living alone in his house. Wondering at the beginning of the narrative about the nature of his reputation, Hubert is excited to make the trip to Europe during his long summer vacation hoping to have some romantic adventures and visit places he hasn’t seen for a long time.
The novel’s plot is remarkably simple and the events that it narrates are quite free of any complex or intriguing incidents that might result in sustained psychological, moral or intellectual explorations. In The Hague while walking through a nudist colony Hubert runs into Helga, his girlfriend from his college days, and that lends the narrative some momentum and charm. They renew their romance but, contrary to Hubert’s hopes, it turns out to be very brief. At the venue where he gives his conference talk there are only a few persons in the audience. Hubert then travels to Germany and then to his aunt’s place in Austria where he suffers from a prolonged illness. On a Friday evening when his aunt is away for several hours, he invites a stripper from Vienna to escape his boredom. Late in the evening the aunt arrives and, to her anger and distress, sees the stripper fast asleep in Hubert’s room.
Although devoid of any serious character-development or thematic complication, the narrative itself is still quite interesting. The thing that most draws one’s attention in this novel is a remarkably complex, rich and nuanced portrayal of the consciousness of the protagonist as a scientist. His observations of almost everything during this trip and the ruminations of his mind are strikingly precise and vivid. There are hardly any literary novels that give such a full-blooded portrayal of the mind of a scientist; science fiction novels have battalions of scientists as protagonists but a vast majority of them do not seem that interesting. Because it is focused on the workings of the protagonist’s mind, it didn’t bother at least this reader that the narrative is not rich with incidents of any moral or psychological complexity, filled with fully developed secondary characters. In fact, the protagonist seems to have little interest in such incidents or characters.
The protagonist does remain engrossed in his own mind, and this makes for a great deal of skillful ventriloquism in the narrative. Like the protagonists of the novels by Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Hubert is prone to prurience and self-indulgence. Regardless of what happens to him, he remains devoted to his own desires and inquisitive attitude. While preoccupied at the beginning of the novel about the potential impermanence of his fame as a scientist, he is quite free of any tendency to torment himself over it. Although he remains quite involved with his own impressions during his journey, he doesn’t withdraw into himself. And when disappointments do occur, he does not indulge in elaborate self-recriminations or denunciations of others. Most of the time he remains detached about himself as well as the world around him. His descriptions of his journey never quite lose their light touch.
Precise attention to detail and honesty mark the protagonist’s response to the world he encounters. His preoccupation is with himself but that doesn’t mean he is introspective; and yet he is primarily his own subject. The story is told entirely from Hubert’s point of view, and his consciousness in its detachment determines the form and substance of the novel.
The meeting of our protagonist with his former New York love Helga in Holland adds some spark to his erotic longing, and the weave of history, memory and desire here makes the narrative interesting. We get only a very short flashback at the protagonist’s past with Helga and so he remains focused on his encounter with her in Holland. After this brief rekindling of their romance Hubert expects to hear from her, but when at long last he does while he is sick in Austria at his aunt’s, her one-sentence note is as good as dismissive. The incident narrating the protagonist inviting a stripper to his aunt’s house while she is away for a whole long evening is perhaps the most hilarious one that proves to be embarrassing when his aunt shows up before the stripper has left.
The language used throughout the narrative has a certain poetic elegance about it; the author has a poetic sensibility that marks the writing every step of the way. Normally, scientific precision and poetic elegance do not go hand-in-hand, except in really exceptional cases, and this novel does fuse them well. Besides this, the narrative has a light ironic undertone that the author is able to employ with great ease. I could cite many examples of this. I will mention, however, just a couple of them. In chapter 2 the protagonist’s intensely self-involved consciousness is neatly illustrated in a page-long single sentence about the Big Bang billions of years ago that produced gravity and force that eventually created temporary organic beings that created in turn many non-Huberts, finally resulting in Hubert himself. The chapter 26, with Helga’s letter, and Aunt Frieda’s anger in a later chapter are among the dramatic moments that add some sizzle to the narrative propelled by the protagonist’s sharply observant mind. The description of the hotel in The Hague is powerful in its dark, gothic strangeness.
The novel is indeed an interesting transatlantic literary work that explores/dramatizes the workings of a scientist’s consciousness in its dealings with both its innate intellectual tendencies and its interests in sometimes tawdry worldly passions and desires. Perhaps only a scientist can explore, and make available to us, the different aspects of a scientist as a fictional protagonist, his acute powers of observation, his humanity and his foibles. Dr. Frank has done exactly that. The novel’s narrator is at his best when he gives a sometimes ironic and humorous account of the protagonist’s disappointments and misadventures.
Dr. Joachim Frank, author of this novel, shared, in 2017, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with two other scientists.”
Yaser Hashem, Group Leader, CNRS, and professor of Biochemistry, University of Bordeaux:
A deep dive into human idiosyncrasies
This is without doubt one of the most authentic novels I had the pleasure of reading. Written by one of the most prominent scientists of our modern times (the 2017 Chemistry Nobel laureate, Joachim Frank), it transports the reader into Hubert’s (the protagonist) idiosyncrasies. The journey commences at the occasion of a banal physics conference, where Hubert stays at a most atypical seaside hotel (Aan Zee), after which follows a rich thread of encounters and turbulent feelings that challenge our protagonist’s tranquility.
I had great pleasure reading the entire novel, and mostly the theater play and the train journey to Austria. The reader can only enjoy the precision of the writing and the authenticity of the feelings.
A treat for all kinds of readers! Mostly during travel . . .
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