Govert Barendse wakes up in hospital, and realises to his surprise that, for the first time in his life, he has a room to himself. He is a man of the "mass generation", having started his life with dozens of other infants in a maternity ward, then moving on to a noisy family, kindergarten, school, military service, internment, work, marriage — even the accident in which he was so seriously injured took place when the bus carrying the members of his football club had to swerve to avoid a party of Boy Scouts and collided with another tour bus.

As he passes in and out of consciousness, Govert struggles to make sense of this unexpected condition of being alone. The only person who seems — fleetingly — to understand what it might mean to him is a young nurse who was in a Japanese internment camp. But she moves on to other duties and doesn't reappear; other medical staff are merely baffled at Govert's failure to expire in the first few hours after the accident. An interestingly offbeat meditation on the busily collective nature of mid-20th-century life, but a bit difficult to relate to from sixty years on. ( )

Dit is een poetisch mooie, zeer originele novelle ( )