Today is the last day of the year, and with that, the last day of reading The Evenings. The novel is famous for a number of reasons, but one of them must be one of its last sentences, which, in the Dutch original, goes as follows.
‘Alles is voorbij’, fluisterde hij, ‘het is overgegaan. Het jaar is er niet meer. Konijn, ik ben levend. Ik adem, en ik beweeg, dus ik leef. Is dat duidelijk? Welke beproevingen ook komen, ik leef.’ Hij zoog de borst vol adem en stapte in bed. ‘Het is gezien’, mompelde hij, ‘het is niet onopgemerkt gebleven.’
The key sentence here is ‘”Het is gezien”, mompelde hij, “het is niet onopgemerkt gebleven.”‘
How is this famous, quite poetic sentence translated? Let’s look at the English translation below.
‘Everything is finished,’ he whispered, ‘it has passed. The year is no more. Rabbit, I am alive. I breathe, and I move, so I live. Is that clear? Whatever ordeals are yet to come, I am alive.’ Drawing his lungs full of air, he climbed into bed. ‘It has been seen,’ he murmured, ‘it has not gone unnoticed.’ He stretched himself out and fell into a deep sleep.
‘It has been seen,’ he murmured, ‘it has not gone unnoticed’ — a quite literal, but very fitting translation. As in the original, it captures, I think, Frits’ fear of (his) life being aimless, purposeless, and of leaving no lasting mark on history.
Unfortunatly, we didn’t even touch on the debacle of Frits’ mother buying wine that turns out to be berry-apple juice, which Frits doesn’t seem to be able to let go. Nor did we go into the non-translation of oliebol. Although there are translations like Dutch doughnut available, the translator chose to leave the word as is — ‘His mother came in with a plate of oliebollen.’ — probably to stress how typically Dutch the snack is. (This is not to say that the oliebol or oliekoek originated in The Nethelands. See this Dutch newspaper article, for instance.)
Let’s end this year’s reading of The Evenings anyway. I had a lot of fun reading the English translation this year. Now there’s 355 days left to decide on next year’s version or translation. But first: champagne and oliebollen! Have a very nice New Year’s Eve!
Day nine, the penultimate chapter of The Evenings! What is the chapter about? Well, we’d have to read the chapter to answer that question, of course, and I will do just that this afternoon, but we can already get a grasp by doing another keyword analysis. We’ll approach the analysis a bit different, however, as we will not use the British National Corpus as a reference, like we did on day three, but we’ll compare today’s chapter to the rest of the book, so chapter 1 to 8 and chapter 10. That way, we’re sure we’ll make a fair comparison, and atop that, we will not have the problem of (Dutch) names dominating the list of keywords.
If we leave all default options on in the Keyword Analysis Tool, we get the following keywords for today.
Keywords in chapter 9 of The Evenings, including zero counts
Still, we see hoogkamp, a name, on first position, which is not unexpected, because Frits meets with him for the first time today. As Eduard Hoogkamp introduces himself by his surname (‘the young man who had introduced himself as Hoogkamp’), this name is indicative of this chapter. It occurs thirty times, much more often than the other keywords in the list, such as chapel, cemetery, and, a personal favourite, hoopla. That last word is interesting, as the Dutch original reads ‘hoepla, hoepla, hoeplala’, but the English translation does not double the last syllable in the last repetition. It simply reads ‘hoopla, hoopla, hoopla’.
But what about the fact that most keywords in the top 10 do not occur at all in the reference corpus? To those so-called ‘zero counts’, a frequency of 0.5 is assigned, which is the default solution in keyword analysis, but I have just added an option to the Keyword Analysis Tool to discard words from the results that do not occur in the reference corpus. Let’s see what this does to the results.
Keywords in chapter 9 of The Evenings, excluding zero counts
Now we see hoogkamp has left, as it does not occur outside of today’s chapter. Interestingly enough, the character by that name is referenced to again outside chapter 9, but only by his first name Eduard (see position 6 in the results). Other keywords that do occur in the rest of the novel, but are significantly more frequent in chapter 9 are bet, uncle, screen and funeral. Bet occurs five times and all on the same page, when Jaap tells the following anecdote, which always makes me laugh, as it is both funny and really inappropriate.
‘Don’t let me forget to tell you about that bet,’ Jaap said. ‘Then,” Frits continued, ‘we have baldness as a result of a disease of the hair or the subcutaneous fat, and thirdly there is baldness due to old age. And if you ask me, I believe that yours is a case of number two: a hair disease.”
‘Have you heard the one about the fellow who says to his friend: you’re not healthy, I bet you have anaemia?’ Jaap asked. ‘So he says: I bet you have anaemia. No, come on, the other fellow says. Sure as sure can be, the first one says, would you like to bet? They bet twenty-five guilders on it and the second fellow goes to the doctor for a check-up. The first one waits outside. After a while his friend comes out of the office, skipping and dancing”—he spread his arms as though taking flight — and he shouts: Ha! I won! I have stomach cancer!’
All in all, keyword analysis can provide some more quantitative insight, but the real fun is in reading, of course. So, have fun reading again today!
One problem with keyword analysis is that the target corpus will likely include words that do not occur in the reference corpus. In calculating various measures of keyness, this would result in a division by zero, which is mathematically impossible, as far as I know. The default way of dealing with this is to assign words that do not occur in the reference corpus a frequency of 0.5, but this introduces the risk of a result in which such keywords dominate the top positions, because their keyness is inflated.
To remedy this problem, I have added an option to the Keyword Analysis Tool which let’s you choose to either go with the default of assigning a 0.5 frequency to ‘zero counts’, or to simply discard them from all calculations, resulting in keywords that have a minimal frequency of 1 in the reference corpus.
Ook dit jaar deed ik mee aan de Oliebollencross in Delft. Door het flink drogere weer dit jaar verwachtte ik wat minder glibberen en glijden dan voorgaande jaren, maar zeker na een paar ronden is het parcours op bepaalde stukken toch altijd nog lekker zompig.
De Oliebollencross in Delft is een leuke, goed bezette wedstrijd die net als voorgaande jaren — geen ‘graaiflatie’ hier — bewijst dat sporten niet duur hoeft te zijn: 3 euro inschrijfgeld en dat is inclusief oliebol na afloop. Koffie erbij voor een euro. Fijn dat dat ook gewoon nog kan in 2025!
Voor de lange cross stonden er zo’n 180 mannen en vrouwen aan de start en het was, zoals bij elke cross, lekker dringen geblazen.
Oliebollencross in Delft, 2025
Omdat ik train voor de Zestig van Texel, liep ik de dag voor de cross een duurloop van 32 kilometer. Het was, ook qua planning thuis, gewoon niet anders. Ik had me daarom voorgenomen deze cross lekker ontspannen te lopen. Een cross is sowieso een goede krachttraining, maar bovenal leuk om te doen, zeker aan het einde van het jaar met een oliebol in het vooruitzicht. Ik voelde duidelijk mijn benen van de dag ervoor en al in het begin dacht ik ‘dit is een prima tempo, harder hoeft het niet.’ Die gedachte kon ik volhouden en ik heb nergens het gevoel gehad in het rood of zelfs maar oranje te lopen. Ik heb gewoon genoten van een mooie cross met leuke mensen.
De oliebol na afloop met Marlies, met wie ik bij de cross had afgesproken, smaakte goed. De jaren ervoor sloeg ik die altijd over en dat zal deels de eetstoornis zijn geweest, maar ik vond het ook wel een gedoetje om van de finish nog een kilometer terug naar het clubhuis te moeten. Ik ben blij dat we dat gisteren toch gedaan hebben, want het was erg gezellig en de eerste oliebol van het jaar, natuurlijk met rozijnen en poedersuiker, was heerlijk.
Uiteindelijk liep ik de lange cross (9,2 kilometer) in 38:51 en dat was vorig jaar, met een veel zwaarder (natter) parcours 38:03. Net als bij de Kustmarathon lukte het tijdens de wedstrijd prima om geen tijds- of positiedoelen te stellen, maar toch kwam ook nu achteraf gedachten op als ‘het had wel harder gekund’ en ‘waarom heb je die en die niet ingehaald’. Geen helpende gedachten, maar wegdrukken werkt ook niet of zelfs averechts. Gewoon maar laten zo dus en nu lekker terugkijken op de mooie, sportieve jaarafsluiting die de Oliebollencross elke keer weer is.
Today is day eight, on which Frits suffers from a hangover from the night before, in which ad fundum proved to be a favourite exclamation. Frits wakes up ‘with a mouth dry as cork’ and takes upon himself to get out of bed, wash up and be done with it, but he falls asleep again. Given Frits’ hangover, let’s take it easy today and look briefly at a little comparison between Reve’s The Evenings and the American coming-of-age novel The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, with which Reves novel is sometimes compared. It won’t be a detailed comparison, but just some quick linguistic/lexical facts.
The Evenings consists of 92.680 words, of which 7.017 are unique, resulting in a type-token-ratio of 0.08. (Again, you can use the Lexical Diversity Calculator to calculate these and more figures yourself.) The Catcher in the Rye is a bit shorter, with 73.629 words of which 4.511 are unique, providing us with a type-token-ratio of 0.06. The mean word lenght in the former novel is 4.11 letters, in the latter it is 3.90. The average sentence length in The Evenings of 10.38 words is however lower than that of the The Catcher in the Rye with 11.03 words. Interestingly, using the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm (Welch, 1984), we see identical compression rates, namely 0.81 on a scale from 0 (no repetition) to 1 (maximum repetition), meaning both novels contain an equal amount of repetition.
Have fun reading today (and go a bit easy on Frits…).
Day seven of The Evenings. Seven comes after six, and that rings of ‘six-seven’, children’s word of the year of 2025 in The Netherlands! You can read about that at NOS Jeugdjournaal. Think of it what you will, but let’s use this interesting word as a gateway into today’s chapter.
The 67th word — which you can easily find using the Lexical Diversity Calculator — is mother, with which Frits’ mother ends the following note she left for him.
Dear Frits. I don’t know where Father is. I have gone to Annetje’s. I will be home around eleven. There is pea soup, and you can take a piece of meat if you like. Just fry some potatoes along with the onions. Until then. Mother.
It really is a quite touching note, as Frits’ parents clearly have relational issues, and while Frits really doesn’t speak nicely of his parents, he does seem affected by their quarrels. His mother leaving for the day is not the first time, and I think it makes Frits’ isolation the more apparent.
So what about the 67th sentence? You can find it using the Sentence Length Tool. Here it is: ‘He came to a canal where a sand barge lay at anchor.’ Frits just listened a bit to the radio and doesn’t know what to do next, being home alone. He decides to go rest a bit, as not to be ‘drowsy this evening.’ He hears children playing, dozes of and dreams of a ship with a funeral cross. When he finally wakes up at five thirty, the chapter reads, his pillow is wet with tears.
While it is easy to critize Frits for being distant, sarcastic and very judging all the time, this chapter always reminds me to feel sorry for him too. The situation with his parents at home is less than stellar, and after not finishing school, Frits seems to be one of the few who hasn’t moved on in life, his former school friends studying, being in relationships, et cetera. I think Frits’ sarcastic comments, and his reliance on silly anecdotes for social interactions reflect his loneliness and his sense of it all being meaningless.
Returning to six-seven, Kristel Doreleijers, linguist at the Meertens Instituut, explains to NOS Jeugdjournaal that ‘it’s really a word of this year, but it doesn’t have much meaning […]’. Maybe that’s what also lacks from Frits’ life at this point: some meaning, something to rival the hopelesness of feeling not to have a purpose in life.
Christmas has passed and it’s day six of The Evenings. Today’s chapter begins not with Frits waking up, but right in the middle of the afternoon, with Frits being at the office, where the lights have to be turned on at a quarter past three, because it was already getting dark outside.
Yesterday, we looked at hapax legomena, or words that appear only once in a text. So, why not look at dis legomena today? Dis legomena are words that occur exactly twice in a text, and most often, they are a lot less frequent than hapaxes. For instance, today’s chapter hosts 925 hapaxes, and ‘only’ 255 dis legomena. One that caught my eye, was oem, of which I thought it might be part of those weird little songs Frits sometimes hums or sings. We’ll look into those later, as it may be interesting to see how those are translated, but we’ll stick to oem for now. The word appears twice and it actually is the name of a lady in the following little story Frits finds in Viktor’s book.
He leafed on. ‘Janet: the gentlemen will surely remember,’ he read, ‘the case of the lady Oem, whose cat had died. I can, to my great satisfaction, report that her recovery is complete. Thanks to a remarkable course of treatment which I, in this case, applied. My treatment of Miss Oem consisted of giving her a new cat.’
Another word occuring exactly twice is lipreader, which draws the attention to quite a funny bit about sitting next to a lipreader in the movie theatre. There are, according to Frits, two types. First, there are ‘the extroverts, who laugh and explain things to those sitting beside them. Those are truly terrible.’ But there’s a worse type of lipreader, ‘the ones who read the subtitles out loud. Aye-aye, Jesus Christ, what an abomination.’ I find these small observations very funny, because they both ring true, and are things you could think yourself, but would not readily say out loud.
‘AT NINE O’CLOCK, by full daylight, he awoke. “The second day of Christmastide has broken,”” he thought.’ It’s Boxing Day today. For anyone, like me, who didn’t know what ‘boxing’ stands for in Boxing Day: apparantly it is a tradition to give away boxes of food and clothing to the poor. With that out of the way, let’s look at hapaxes in today’s chapter of The Evenings!
Hapax Legomena are words that occur only once in a given text. Today’s chapter contains quite a lot of them, such as christmastide in the quote above. You can easily index all hapaxes using the Lexical Diversity Calculator yourself, if you whish.
Other hapaxes are daylight, alleyway, and, I’m sorry it caught my eye, fart. I took the liberty of looking into the use of this last word in the chapter — never waste a good rabbit hole when you find one.
Fart occurs in the following snippet: ‘”Do you know what that reminds me of?” Frits said suddenly. “Of my grandfather, who’s dead now, the old fart. […]”‘ Aha, it’s not a literal use of fart! Let’s see how Frits calls his grandfather in the original text, as I don’t recall seeing the Dutch equivalent of fart being used this way. In the Dutch text, it reads ‘”Weet je waar ik aan denken moet?” zei Frits plotseling, “aan mijn grootvader, hij is nou dood, die oude hoer. […]”‘ How interesting, oude hoer is translation into old fart. If you ask me, altough both the original and the translation explicitly mention oud/old, old fart does not have the idiomatic meaning of oude hoer in Dutch, which has to do with excessive talking, whining or nagging.
I couldn’t help myself and went over to the Etymologiebank to check my intuitions. Sure enough, it says ‘ouwehoeren komt al voor in Kamertjeszonde (1896) van Herman Heyermans. En het scheldwoord ouwehoer (zeurder) werd al teruggevonden in ‘Het Sermoen’, een geschrift in het Maastrichts uit 1729!’ (‘Ouwehoeren (whining) already appears in Herman Heyermans’ Kamertjeszonde (1896). And the insult ouwehoer (whiner) was already found in Het Sermoen, a Maastricht dialect work from 1729!’ Apparantly, reading the rest of the entry on ouwehoer(en), the verb ouwehoeren became popular among soldiers in in the former Dutch East Indies.
Now, I could be mistaken, but old fart generally refers to old-fashioned persons, not overtly talkative ones. In today’s chapter, the quote appears in an episode in which Frits talks to Maurits, right after the following segment: ‘”You had better keep your mouth shut,” said Maurits, “you talk too much.” “Come now,” Frits said, “I know what I’m saying. Don’t worry. Besides, I have a great respect and fondness for you.” Maurits grimaced.’ So, we are definitely in the realm of people talking too much, and it seems the translation of oude hoer into old fart doesn’t cover that aspect.
Interestingly, my wife, who is reading the Dutch original this year, told me that a couple of pages before the occurrence of oude hoer referring to Frits’ grandfather, Frits refers to himself as follows: ‘Ik ben niet zo’n oude hoer, om zo iets te zeggen.’ Here, the English translation reads ‘I’m not the kind of gasbag who would say something like that.’ So, here oude hoer is translated into gasbag, which, according to the Cambridge Dictionary means ‘a person who always talks too much’. I guess that translation reflects the original much better.
As I was working on a very brief piece on the Hirsch-Popescu Point (HPP) in one of the chapters of Reve’s The Evenings, it occurred to me that the Lexical Diversity Calculator does calculate the Hirsch-Popescu Point, but that it didn’t yet offer the option to actually look at the sorted frequency table used for determining the HPP. As that table can be very informative, I now implemented the displaying of it in Lexical Diversity Calculator. The actual HPP, so the word which has a position in the sorted frequency list that matches it frequency, is marked in bold and red for easy identification.
Christmas day! Frits woke up a quarter to eight and ‘his first thought was: “It is Christmas Day.”‘ I must admit that my first thought was of coffee.
Today’s chapter of The Evenings hosts almost 7.000 words (6993 to be precise), of which 1585 are different. That means the chapter has a type-token-ratio of 0.23, and the mean word length of 4 letters, both (dated) indicators of readability. As I worked on an online implementation of the so-called Hirsch-Popescu Point recently (see https://www.reuneker.nl/2025/12/hirsch-popescu-point-added-to-lexical-diversity-calculator), I thought it would be fun to see where that point, at which the frequency of a word matches its position in a sorted distribution table, lies in this chapter.
The Hirsch-Popescu Point (red) in chapter 4 of The Evenings.
Using the Lexical Diversity Calculator, it turns out the Hirsch-Popescu Point is 32: the word no occurs 32 times, and is the 32nd word in the word distribution. Going back to the text, we encounter it early on, right after Frits’ initial thought of it being Christmas Day actually: ‘On the window he saw no frost flowers.’
Have fun reading on this Christmas Day, and have a nice Christmas of course!
