Before World War II, few Dutch or Flemish authors figured prominently in the world republic of letters. The versatile Louis Couperus (1863–1923), who reveled in the fin de siècle and was arguably more attuned to English and French than Dutch tastes, was deservedly popular abroad, but the few authors whose works have endured are an eclectic bunch. Arguably the great Dutch novel of the nineteenth century, Multatuli’s (Eduard Douwes Dekker, 1820–1887) Max Havelaar (1860, English 1927, 1967) is a playfully subversive and stylistically very modern work of fiction. While its criticism of Dutch colonialism (in what is now Indonesia) is powerful, it is Multatuli’s literary experimentation that continues to impress, and its influence can still be found in recent Dutch fiction. Flemish author Willem Elsschot’s (1882–1960) works of fiction show a gentle humor, especially in describing working and business life, and have aged well. Ferdinand Bordewijk’s (1884–1965) father–son tale, Character (1938, English 1966), offers a grim and vivid picture of the times and local conditions.
Four authors, all prolific and with strong, colorful personalities, long dominated the local literary scene after World War II:
Willem Frederik Hermans (1921–1995),
Harry Mulisch (1927–2010),
Gerard Reve (1923–2006), and
Hugo Claus (1929–2008).
Reve’s and, until recently, Hermans’s works are underappreciated outside the Netherlands. Hermans’s novels present moral and philosophical issues, often with an underhanded sense of humor. The Darkroom of Damocles (1958, English 1962, 2007), one of only two titles available in English, is a darkly ironic novel of deceptions and the failures of best intentions. The protagonist, Henri Osewoudt, is enlisted by Dorbeck, a man who could pass as his twin, in activities he is led to believe are in support of the Dutch resistance against the Nazis. Although Osewoudt means well, he is in far over his head. He sees Dorbeck, a man of action, as the person he could have been, but he eventually is unable to substantiate even Dorbeck’s existence.
Although one of Gerard Reve’s first books, the story collection The Acrobat (1956), was even written in English, it did nothing to launch his career. Only when he turned back to Dutch and his personal experiences, did Reve, a convert to Catholicism and a very public homosexual, find his milieu. Explicit for the times, his fiction is considerably less shocking now, but for the most part his mature work still seems too hot for British and American publishers to handle. Only his enjoyable novel of a day in the life of a very frustrated poet, Parents Worry (1988, English 1990), is available in English, although a translation of his 1947 debut and most popular work, De Avonden (The Evenings), is scheduled for 2016.
Harry Mulisch’s (1927–2010) fiction is colored by a family background that exposed him to moral ambiguity and personal loss from a young age: his father was jailed for his wartime collaboration with the Nazis, and his Jewish mother lost most of her immediate family in the concentration camps. Mulisch’s most famous work,
The Assault (1982, English 1985), is one of many that deal with recent Dutch history and questions of morality. This five-part novel begins in 1945 with the murder of a Dutch collaborator, which leads to the separation of young Anton Steenwijk from his family, and then describes four later stages in Anton’s life between 1952 and 1981. Revisiting the events of that fateful day, revealing new perspectives, and showing the lasting consequences, a complex picture of guilt and innocence emerges in a novel that explores coming to terms with a dark past.
Mulisch’s magnum opus, The Discovery of Heaven (1992, English 1996), is ambitious from the start, a summing up of his life and interests. In it, God is set to break the covenant between heaven and earth and charges two angels with finding a human agent to retrieve the stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments are inscribed. The earthbound action centers on the two father figures of the chosen one, Max Delius and Onno Quist, who, despite their very different personalities, are close friends. A woman comes between them, and her child, Quinten, is the one charged with the heavenly mission. The best parts of The Discovery of Heaven are the relationships between the two men and with the woman, when the supernatural elements are not in play. With its dramatic conclusion, the novel defies easy categorization, but its treatment of philosophical and theological issues certainly qualifies it as an intellectual thriller. It is Mulisch’s masterpiece and one of the great European novels of the postwar era.
Mulisch’s modern “golem” story, The Procedure (1998, English 2001), is a fascinating creation tale, setting scientific, human, and artistic creation side by side. A novel of ideas, it is the most artfully constructed of his works. In Siegfried (2001, English 2003), the narrator is a Dutch author who in many ways resembles Mulisch and who also has long been preoccupied with the phenomenon of Nazism and its consequences. The author has decided that perhaps the only way to grasp the figure of Hitler is through fiction, and on a visit to Vienna he is supplied with the perfect material for such a hypothetical novel, the possibility that Hitler had a son. Mulisch complicates his tale by blurring the lines between fact and fiction, and this short novel feels almost too compressed to hold everything that he has to say but still is a powerful and disturbing work.
Flemish author
Hugo Claus (1929–2008) was a highly regarded poet and also wrote for the stage and film, but he is best known for his great novel
The Sorrow of Belgium (1983, English 1990). With its protagonist, Louis Seynaeve, the same age as Claus, this coming-of-age novel set during World War II describes a Flanders where many are complicit in and amenable to the Nazi presence, producing an unsettling portrait of the place and times.
The Duck Hunt (1950, English 1955, and as
Sister of Earth, 1966) is also a story of adolescence, influenced by William Faulkner. Of Claus’s other novels available in translation,
Desire (1978, English 1997) is the most interesting. Describing a group of drinking buddies from a local tavern who set out for America and Las Vegas, it is a brutal little morality play.
Among contemporary Dutch authors, only Cees Nooteboom (b. 1933) rivals Mulisch in terms of international recognition, and his literary fiction, generally less closely tied to Dutch specifics (except, ironically, when addressing questions of language), has an even more obvious transnational appeal. His novels tend to be puzzles, playfully constructed like some of the works of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, and self-referentially philosophical in the manner of Milan Kundera. Almost always rewarding what limited perseverance his fiction requires, little of it is annoyingly bewildering. Several of Nooteboom’s novellas even feature writers and center on storytelling. In both A Song of Truth and Semblance (1981, English 1984) and In the Dutch Mountains (1984, English 1987), the relationship between creators and their unfolding creations is central, while in The Knight Has Died (1963, English 1990), a man tries to complete a novel left unfinished by a friend of his who died.
In Rituals (1980, English 1983) and The Following Story (1991, English 1994)—two of Nooteboom’s finest novels—as well as Lost Paradise (2004, English 2007), Nooteboom leaves his characters unrooted, moving them in time and place. The beautifully wrought Rituals is a three-part novella of encounters during the life of its protagonist, Inni. A father and son he meets, decades apart, try to impose different sorts of extreme order on their lives, looking for meaning in rituals. Inni also is searching for a foothold, and it is his more aimless drifting that proves more viable.
Both of David Colmer’s translations of two of
Gerbrand Bakker’s (b. 1962) novels have won major English-language literary prizes.
The Twin (2006, English 2008) won the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and
The Detour (published in the United States as
Ten White Geese; 2010, English 2012) won the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. These concentrated atmospheric meditations, with their isolated figures and sense of mystery, are fine, thoughtful works of fiction.
The most promising younger Dutch talent is the prolific Arnon Grunberg (b. 1971), who has written several very entertaining novels about young men trying to find themselves, most notably Silent Extras (1997, English 2000) and The Story of My Baldness (published under the pseudonym Marek van der Jagt; 2000, English 2004). These are funny novels of halfhearted ambition, with the characters having grand plans but their will to follow through always ebbing quickly away. Grunberg’s most ambitious variation on the theme, The Jewish Messiah (2004, English 2008), is about a Swiss youth whose misguided empathy for the Jewish people leads him to become a Hitlerian messiah (and eventually the leader of Israel). This novel offers some promising satire but goes off the rails when Grunberg seems to lose patience with developing his idea and hurries through the later parts. He does not seem to know what to do with a protagonist who actually succeeds.
Grunberg’s finest novel to date is the heartbreaking Tirza (2006, English 2013), a painstakingly detailed depiction of a man slowly coming entirely unglued. The main character, Jörgen Hofmeester, has been abandoned by his wife and put out to pasture at work, and the sole remaining light of his life is his daughter, Tirza, who is now on the cusp of adulthood. The well-meaning but hapless Hofmeester clearly has difficulty letting go, but Grunberg only slowly reveals how truly desperate he has become.
Flemish author
Paul Verhaeghen’s (b. 1965) almost ridiculously ambitious
Omega Minor (2004, English 2007) is among the region’s most impressive individual recent works that are available in English. Among much else, it covers the Jewish experience in the Third Reich, the Manhattan Project, and the building of the Berlin Wall. It is about the telling and the making of history amid personal guilt and innocence. Verhaeghen takes his time in unfolding his large tapestry, but it turns out to be a superior thriller as well—complete with a rather too sensational denouement. As the rare book that can pass as both a pulp airport novel and literary fiction, it is not entirely successful but does deliver an extraordinary bang for its buck.
KEEP IN MIND
• Tim Krabbé (b. 1943) is best known for the film adaptations of his creepy novel The Vanishing (1984, English 1993), although the 1993 Hollywood remake retreated from his horrific ending. His other short psychological thrillers, Delay (1994, English 2005) and The Cave (1997, English 2000), also have implausible elements, but in each the pieces come together in enjoyably unsettling conclusions.
• Marcel Möring’s (b. 1957) novels entail memory, history, and Jewish identity, especially The Great Longing (1992, English 1995), which deals with the family-shattering early loss of one’s parents.
• Leon de Winter’s (b. 1954) very entertaining Hoffman’s Hunger (1990, English 1995), a novel that is everything from a spy caper to a portrait of a man overwhelmed by too many hungers, is among the few of his consistently enjoyable and wide-ranging, John Irving–like works available in English.
• Herman Koch (b. 1953) specializes in well-turned dark comic morality tales, and with its outrageous twists, the best-selling The Dinner (2009, English 2012) is the best of these.
• Connie Palmen’s (b. 1955) novels of relationships are worth reading.
• Hella S. Haasse’s (1918–2011) well-regarded historical novels are worth reading as well.
• Margriet de Moor’s (b. 1941) clever—if perhaps overly impassioned—crowd-pleasers merit attention.