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High Road to Culture in Flanders and the Netherlands
After a fairly hysterical decade, the Netherlands is a divided country, not explosively divided and torn apart, but without a heartfelt concern for the public interest in general. That is the cutting thesis of the author.
Foreign cartoons from the 17th to the mid-19th century show that the Netherlands has not always had a very positive international image.
In his novel about a Flemish Nazi collaborator, bestselling author Stefan Hertmans presents a sharp image of life under German occupation, which he links perceptively to the personal history of his characters.
The spring of 1993, almost three years after his death, saw the publication of the ‘Collected Poems' of Hans Faverey (1933-1990): just over five hundred poems in one sober volume on india paper, in an almost classical format. Although the b...
Leo Pleysier is, in some sense, a writer of small literature. His gaze is not fixed on literary history, nor on the all-embracing and universal, the themes not tied to time and place in which ‘the Great' seem to feel so at home. He has stri...
Charlotte Mutsaers is not one of those writers whose goal is a revolutionary new form at all costs, nor is her aim that of for instance Italo Calvino, to write a totally different book that bears no relation to previous books each time. On ...
In 2001 the Flemish writer Erwin Mortier had two books to his name – together hardly more than three hundred pages, but more than enough to warrant the assessment that Dutch literature has been enriched with a new sound. And what is so rema...
There is always something informal and casual about the work of the Dutch writer J. Bernlef (1937-). From his earliest work onwards, he has searched for things that have not yet been recorded, catalogued or given significance. He searches f...
If ever a writer in Dutch literature was blessed with eternal youth, that writer was Remco Campert. For decades his books bore witness to an almost provocative insouciance, which was perfectly expressed by the boyish, slightly mocking laugh...
Mortier writes a refined, sensual Dutch unmarred by fashionable clichés. The world his books evoke is still conventional and Catholic to the core. Sleep of the Gods (2008) has the Great War as its theme: it deserves to be mentioned in the s...
Turkish Delight, both book and film were perfect expressions of the upheaval of the sixties and its hedonistic paradise. The literary prototype of the Dutch bourgeois, however, dates from the nineteenth century: a personage named Batavus Dr...
The books mentioned in this essay testify to mental resistance. The fact that they are there at all is nothing short of a miracle. They embody an ambition which runs counter to the cynical neo-Liberalism that has the world in its devastati...
It is one of the ironic quirks of history that some of the core concepts of the anti-authoritarian movements of the 1960s should re-emerge unchanged a couple of decades later, though pointing in the opposite direction, in the publicity and...
How do we have to treat books that have fallen out of favour or have become taboo due to a changing Zeitgeist and more progressive perceptions?
