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.