(Querido, 1992, 168 pages)

‘What I just experienced must have been a hallucination. But what isn’t?’ mumbles Otto in the story ‘Model’. He’s a clerk who carries out meaningless work in the national archives in The Hague during the daytime but quenches his thirst in the evenings with alcohol and the poetic thoughts it gives him. The question as to what’s reality and what’s invention is brushed aside in several places in the book as an irrelevancy. What’s important is a good story and – to that end – those who turn their eyes and ears in nonstandard directions can find the necessary dark desires bubbling up in boring clerks, withered women of easy virtue and apparently good and upright wives and…

(Contact, 1997, 396 pages)

Throughout her writing career Helga Ruebsamen has been something of a writer‘s writer. Not because her short story collections are accessible only to connoisseurs of fine prose: on the contrary, the critics have always praised the clarity of her style. No, the relatively limited extent of her readership has always been an injustice. Her new novel, Het lied en de waarheid, has finally set things right. This big novel, in which Ruebsamen subtly presents her childhood memories of a country house in the Dutch East Indies and the horrors of the Second World War, is nothing short of sensational.