(De Bezige Bij, 1994, 310 pages)

In her essay collection Kersebloed, Charlotte Mutsaers wrote heartwarming sentences about artists she admires, such as Jules Renard, Francis Ponge, Daniil Charms and Dora Carrington. Her own work, like theirs, is characterized by a certain lightness and playfulness. The attention she once paid to toys, animals, unusual words and no less unusual human behaviours in figurative paintings and wood cuts, and which she now pays to them in plastic prose, could be misconstrued by inattentive readers as being merely naive and humorous. Yet Mutsaers has never skirted around serious subjects. On the contrary. Her unyielding lightness is a ploy designed to crush heaviness, crudeness and ugliness.…

(De Bezige Bij, 1999, 254 pages)

Zeepijn is a lively book of sparkling, narrative essays about the sea, pine trees, fish, and fir cones, father, mother, Francis Ponge and Henri Michaux, Christmas and Ostend, the village on the Belgian coast where Mutsaers spent part of her life. It consists of thirty-six short chapters, which assume almost as many different forms. Charlotte Mutsaers’s highly commended, associative and very personal writing style makes Zeepijn a strange and agreeable adventure for the reader.

(Das Mag, 2017, 312 pages)

Charlotte Mutsaers’ new book is dedicated to ‘all members of the family I come from and the house where we lived’. It is an ambiguous declaration of love for a parental nest that produced misfortune and good fortune, mystery and undiluted misery; it is at once a testimony of loyalty and betrayal.