(Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1994, 271 pages)

Absurd, unashamed and amusing’ well describes the life story of the character Arnon Grunberg, drawn up by the author of the same name. Little by little, the latter reveals what the former is like – a refined method that shows the writer to be considerably less harebrained than the Grunberg on paper, a small, Jewish, good-for-nothing guy with a grossly pale face, big nose, curly hair, glasses and pimples, who gives off an odor that begs for a pail of water and a big bar of soap.

(Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1997, 300 pages)

Whereas Grunberg described the world of paid love and escort services in his first novel, Blauwe maandagen, here he describes the film world. The protagonist Ewald Stanislas Krieg and his two friends, the eccentric Broccoli and the inaccessible Elvira, have ‘heard the call of Hollywood’ and make futile efforts to become rich and famous. What follows is a hilarious but humiliating journey through casting agencies, alternative youth theatre and the odd supporting role: ‘In the script they called the part I had to play Pimply Kid.’

(Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2000, 256 pages)

‘If the laws of economics apply to anything, then it’s to emotions,’ is one of Robert Mehlman’s many one-liners. Mehlman, the central character in Phantom Pain, is tormented by writer’s block, his only successful publication being a cookery book called The Polish-Jewish Kitchen in 69 Recipes, which he wrote purely for money. He briefly became world famous when his book was interpreted as a positive take on coming to terms with the Holocaust – only Arnon Grunberg, or perhaps Woody Allen, could come up with a joke like that.

(Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2003, 352 pages)

Arnun Grunberg’s mad literary universe has become increasingly grim over the last few years. Whereas in the early novels tragedy chafed under humour, this now seems to be reversed. After Gstaad 95-98 (published under the pseudonym Marek van der Jagt), in which, to your horror, you have to admit that you feel sympathy for a totally loony, anally fixated child murderer, The Asylum Seeker again exerts the same kind of ‘guilty’ effect on the reader for his disgust and compassion.

(Rothschild & Bach, 2004, 495 pages)

‘Because his grandfather had served the SS with genuine enthusiasm and an abiding belief in progress, the grandson also wanted to serve a movement with enthusiasm and belief in progress.’ This is the kick-off to a slapstick story with a grim twist. The movement that 16-year old Xavier Radek decides to serve is Zionism. More specifically, his goal is to console the Jews.

(Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2004, 87 pages)

The protagonist of the short novel Monkey Grabbing Hold of Happiness, Jean-Baptist Warnke, number two at the Dutch Embassy in Peru, is no exception. In his work as a diplomat Warnke calmly bobs with the tide. Instead of consular assistance, compatriots who find themselves in Peruvian prisons receive a fruit hamper and a couple of Edam cheeses: ‘If you examine it closely, freedom is largely a matter of a proper diet.’

(Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2006, 432 pages)

It is nothing short of remarkable how Arnon Grunberg continually reinvents himself. Each new book is strikingly different from the last, but at the same time they are all unmistakably Grunberg with his unforgiving eye for human frailties and compelling, wryly ironic style. At first glance, the bizarre, sadistic universe that informed Grunberg’s earlier works seems to be absent from Tirza.

(Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2010, 512 pages)

Economist Roland Oberstein is one of the forty most renowned authorities on Adam Smith in the world. He is also the co-author of a collection of essays entitled Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Genocide – of interest to him because of his Jewish background. The same is true for economics: his mother, survivor of several camps, was a rather cold and miserly woman. Roland hopes to establish his reputation as an economist once and for all with a standard work on bubbles. To him, economics is a game based on cheating. People want to be cheated as much as they themselves cheat others. Roland is utterly convinced this principle applies to all human interaction – including love, which, he…

(Podium, 2010, 124 pages)

In 2010 author Arnon Grunberg travelled by car through the Middle East and wrote a series of articles for NRC. On the basis of these reports, photographs and Grunberg’s blog pieces, Kolk created the graphic novel Van Istanbul naar Bagdad, a road movie in pen and paper.

(Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2012, 222 pages)

An architect, as idealistic as he is naive, is the central character of the eleventh novel by Arnon Grunberg, the most talented young writer of the Nether­lands. In The Man without Illness an arrogant Westerner is destroyed amid the harshness and random cruelties of a chaotic Middle East.

(Lebowski, 2016, 399 pages)

Hannelore Grünberg-Klein, mother of Arnon Grunberg, died on 10th February 2015. She was eighty-seven and a survivor of Auschwitz. Anyone who has followed Grunberg’s career will be conscious of what a blow that must have been. Their relationship was symbiotic. When she died Grunberg wrote, ‘Now I’ll have to live on as my mother.’

(Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2018, 512 pages)

Arnon Grunberg’s 14th novel charts the downfall of Geniek Janowski, a Polish-German firefighter doing his best to be a good father, husband, lover and colleague, only to fail on all fronts.

(Lebowski, 2020, 432 pages)

As a writer, Grunberg set himself the task of filling up the gaps in human memory with fiction. That’s how he gave meaning to life and enabled his readers to live vicariously through his work. Twenty years after his debut, Grunberg set out to write a major novel about his mother Hannelore, who survived Auschwitz as a child. He moved back into his childhood home but on the evening of February 9th, 2015 she died, at the age of 87. ‘Now I have to become my own mother,’ he wrote.

(Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2021, 320 pages)

In his sixteenth novel, Arnon Grunberg returns to the preoccupations of his early work, featuring chaotic, self-destructive, non-conformist types and compulsive runaways, people who treat life as a game, raising the stakes in each new round. Death in Taormina takes place in the world of opera and theatre, a world in which the protagonist Zelda becomes entangled in a fatal game between reality and fiction.