Tim Krabbé (b. 1943) earned international fame with Het gouden ei (The Vanishing, 1984), which as a film became a cult classic. His 1978 novel De renner (The Rider) is an international classic of sports literature. From Krabbé’s writing it is apparent that the author himself is a master of the game of chess. His work has been translated into many languages.
(Prometheus, 1978, 129 pages)
Tim Krabbé’s De renner is to Dutch literature what Paris-Roubaix is to bicycle road-racing: a royal classic. It’s a ride to the sun, and a ride to Zen – the definitive abc of sports, an encyclopedia, a literary masterpiece, an adventure novel and bicycling odyssey all rolled into one. Perhaps the most surprising thing about De renner is that it covers only 129 pages, yet cries out to be read again and again.
(Prometheus, 1984, 100 pages)
With his Nordic cousins Henning Mankell and Karin Fossum, both currently enjoying worldwide success, Tim Krabbé shares a Northern European taste for depressive heroes and sinister scenarios. Het gouden ei (The Vanishing, 1984), already familiar to those who have seen either of the novel’s cinematic incarnations, both of which are cult classics, is no less chilling now than it was at the time of its original publication in 1984.
(Prometheus, 1997, 184 pages)
Tim Krabbé is the author of the both as a novel and a film internationally successful The Vanishing. It was after all so much more than an exciting story with a brilliant plot: it could be understood on various levels, as an exceptional thriller or as a philosophical story about the banality of evil and the impossibility of love. The same is true for his novel De grot (The Cave) in which an exciting intrigue about drug smuggling in an unspecified Asian country is intertwined with a story about friendship and love.
(Prometheus, 2001, 274 pages)
Tim Krabbé sure knows how to write a thrilling story. In novels like De grot (The Grotto, 1997), De vertraging (The Delay, 1994) and Het gouden ei (The Golden Egg, 1987) he used all his skills to create great suspense. No wonder Krabbé is one of the Netherlands’ most popular writers, and that his work has been translated into fifteen languages.
(Prometheus, 2012, 416 pages)
On 20 April 1999 Eric Harris (18) and Dylan Klebold (17) killed twelve students, a teacher and themselves at Columbine High School in Colorado. Although worse rampage shootings have happened since, ‘Columbine’ remains the ultimate example of mass murder as a form of individual expression.
