‘The Evenings,’ a Dutch Classic, Arrives in English. It Only Took 70 Years.

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AMSTERDAM — Reviewers have compared it favorably to J .D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” Albert Camus’s “The Stranger” and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle.” In The Irish Times, Eileen Battersby called it “one of the finest studies of youthful malaise ever written,” and in The Guardian, Tim Parks described it as “not only a masterpiece but a cornerstone manqué of modern European literature.”

The novel being praised, Gerard Reve’s “The Evenings,” was originally published in 1947. But English-language readers are only now getting a chance to judge this Dutch classic for themselves. Pushkin Press released the first English translation of the book, by Sam Garrett, in Britain in November, and will publish it in the United States on Jan. 31.

Fresh admiration for “The Evenings” comes as no surprise to readers in the Netherlands. The Society of Dutch Literature ranked it as the country’s best 20th-century novel and its third-best of all time. Long taught in Dutch high schools as a turning point in the country’s literary canon, it has never gone out of print here.

“The Evenings” (“De Avonden”) takes place over the last 10 nights of 1946. It’s narrated by Frits van Egters, a 23-year-old clerk in Amsterdam who still lives with his parents in a cramped apartment near the Amstel River. Frits is occupied during working hours, but in his free time he struggles with a sense of anxious aimlessness and isolation. Inwardly, he dissects the absurd banality of his life while he observes, with an acute sense of cynicism and occasional brutality, the slow decline of his doting middle-age parents.

Little mention is made in the novel of the impact of the cataclysmic Second World War that has just ended, or of the Dutch famine (known as “the hunger winter” in the Netherlands) that claimed about 22,000 lives just two years earlier, at the end of the Nazi occupation of the country. The story is nevertheless steeped in a sense of postwar gloom, and the dark humor that pervades the book underscores the difficulty of finding meaning in a world torn asunder.

Like his protagonist, Reve was 23 in 1946, living in Amsterdam and grappling with postwar realities while trying to find his writerly voice. He wrote “The Evenings” at 24, and it was an instant success, earning him the Reina Prinsen Geerligs Prize, given to the best young writer in the Netherlands.

A complex and unclassifiable personality, Reve had rebelled against his communist, atheist parents by converting to Roman Catholicism — a rather unusual move that some thought might be a strange joke, since he also came out as gay and wrote vividly about homosexuality.

Daniel Seton, the commissioning publisher for Pushkin, learned about “The Evenings” from Victor Schiferli, a specialist in fiction at the nonprofit Dutch Foundation for Literature in Amsterdam.

After “The Evenings” was published, Reve “was very famous and he was on TV all the time, loved by everybody,” Mr. Schiferli said. “But privately, he suffered from depression most of his life, from alcoholism, things that were not really known to the public.”

The author’s life was marked by scandals. A Dutch government official denied him a travel grant because of his vivid depictions of masturbation, and later the Belgian king refused to present him with a literary prize, because Reve’s partner had been accused of indecency with a minor. Reve was also prosecuted for blasphemy in 1966, because of an essay in which he expressed a wish to have sex with God, who was depicted as a donkey.

Mr. Seton was immediately taken with “The Evenings.” “It just completely got me under its spell,” he said. “It’s a very strange book, very funny, very dark.”

The novel is already in its fifth printing in Britain, a fact that is encouraging to Steerforth Press, the small independent publisher handling the distribution of the novel in the United States. Book sellers in the United States have already ordered 3,000 copies, and a second print run is underway.

“The Dutch view is that this is the postwar novel that revolutionized Dutch literature stylistically,” said Adam Freudenheim, the publisher and managing director of Pushkin Press.

“For me it does really connect to so many books from that period, like Salinger or Camus, who portray this alienated young man in a kind of existential crisis,” he added, echoing comparisons that have been made by reviewers. “I also feel that there’s a direct line from it to Knausgaard’s autobiographical novels, in which a lot of time is spent on not a lot happening.”

Boredom is certainly one of the central concerns in “The Evenings,” as Frits frequently notes the insistent march of the hours. “He sighed, hung the shaving mirror back on its peg beside the kitchen window and went into the living room,” Reve writes. “He sat down on the divan. ‘We’re more than halfway,’ he thought, ‘the afternoon started an hour ago. Valuable time, time irretrievable, have I squandered.’”

Mr. Schiferli was Reve’s last editor at De Bezige Bij, the book’s original Dutch publisher, and was in charge of republishing Reve’s work when the author was in his 70s and suffering from Alzheimer’s. He said Reve had an uneasy relationship with “The Evenings.” Reve felt it “was a beginner’s work, although the audience didn’t see it that way,” Mr. Schiferli said.

The writer later adopted a quite different style of writing, “more baroque, more in-your-face personal,” Mr. Schiferli added. “He never read ‘The Evenings’ after he wrote it, until the 1990s, when he was invited to read the whole book for the radio. After that, he said something like, ‘Well, apparently it’s not so bad after all.’”