herself a new name in the book, ‘Gisela’, just as she is to give herself a different name in each of her following works. Beyond doubt, all these names should not be seen primarily as (transparent) disguises for a novelist who wants to conceal herself, but rather as indications of the changing forms in which she depicts herself in successive stages of her life.
One fact associated with this central theme is that, as early as Amazone with the Blue Forehead, the two different worlds in which Monika van Paemel spent her childhood years take on the sharply contrasted symbolic meaning which they will retain through all her later works. On the one side is the carefree outdoor life in the still unspoiled landscape of the Leie valley, and as she looks back on this life with nostalgia, it takes on the significance of a paradise forever lost. It is emotionally described as the place of the warm nest, the domain of caring mothers and a life of unthreatened communion with animals and plants. Opposed to this is the city, the place where her parents and grandparents live - and where grandmother Marguerite is the central figure - the feared and detested domain of the conservative bourgeoisie with its oppressive rules of behaviour and Catholic morality. For Gisela, this is where misery begins. She arrives in a man's world of dominant, unimaginative ‘fathers’, for whom bricks and mortar seem to represent the greatest good. Her fierce rebellion against this forms the sarcastic exposé element in the book.
When Monika van Paemel wrote this book, she was a young woman in her mid-twenties, married and the mother of two daughters. Her marriage itself, which she no doubt did experience as oppressive, remains in the shadows, but her personal, mostly internalised view of life stands out all the more clearly. The main theme is an exuberant longing for love which is very closely associated with the longing for freedom. In general this means a love of the uninhibited pleasures of earthly life, but in more concrete terms it is love as the highest rule of conduct, as lusty erotic intimacy, as moral and emotional involvement in what is going on in the world. Each of her later books contains wonderful evocations of the sensual pleasure provided by her amorous lover, or the lack of it. These feelings are experienced in a quite physical, sensual way, and they include motherhood and in a broader sense concern and care for animals, for everything which arouses the writer's inclination to protect and defend: her ‘herderscomplex’ (shepherd complex) as she calls it in the essay Experience (Het wedervaren, 1993).
At the very beginning, Monika van Paemel found the form and style which were to remain her permanent trademark, and these are within the modernist tradition. The structure of her novels is fragmentary and mosaic-like, the narrative lyrical, associative, contemplative and dramatic rather than epic; her way of writing is spontaneous, emotional but controlled by the power of form, dynamic, in turn staccato and measured. Her second novel, The Confrontation (De confrontatie, 1974), is the dramatised depiction of two opposing personalities within herself, in the form of Mirjam, who is forceful, ruthless and bitterly rebellious, and Zoë, who needs security, gentleness and harmony. It is not until the end of the book that the two come together again in an unstable equilibrium. Her third novel, Marguerite (1976) is an attempt to settle accounts with the figure of her grandmother, who is grippingly portrayed as a brisk businesswoman whose independence she identifies with, while at the same time she finds her mocking and narrow-minded bourgeois mentality repulsive.