Cheese, published in Dutch as Kaas in 1933, is a short comic novel by Willem Elsschot, the pen name of Alfons de Ridder, an Antwerp advertising man who became one of the most admired prose writers in Flemish literature. Its premise is simple and merciless: what happens when an ordinary, unambitious clerk tries to become a businessman. Frans Laarmans works as a clerk at a shipbuilding company in Antwerp when, shortly after his mother's death, a well-connected acquaintance arranges for him to become the Belgian agent of a Dutch firm selling Edam cheese.
Laarmans throws himself not into selling but into the trappings of commerce. He takes leave from his steady job, invents an imposing company name, fusses over letterhead, a desk, a typewriter, and the perfect office, and imagines the respect his new status will bring from his family and from the bourgeois gentlemen whose company he craves. Meanwhile an enormous consignment of red-rinded cheeses arrives and sits in a warehouse, and he finds he has no idea how to move it, nor much stomach for trying. Elsschot's prose is spare, ironic, and precise, and the novel's humor shades steadily into pathos as Laarmans's self-deception and humiliation mount. Read as a satire of commercial pretension and the theater of entrepreneurship, it skewers the gap between the language of business and its substance, while also offering a sympathetic portrait of a man trapped by class anxiety and the desire to be someone else. It is a compact classic of European modernist comedy.