(Nijgh & Van Ditmar, )

J. Slauerhoff is one of the greatest Dutch poets of the twentieth century. He owes the unique position he occupies in Dutch literature to completely personal themes he carved out in equally personal poetry. Longing for the passionate love for a woman, struck by the tragedy of loneliness, the yearning to be elsewhere or somewhere in the past, the desire for the sea, the disenchantment with present-day life, the awareness of degeneration, all these themes mark him as a late Romantic poet.

(Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1932, 150 pages)

In The Forbidden Realm, J. Slauerhoff draws on existing stories, mainly from the nineteenth century, about Luis Camões, a sixteenth-century Portuguese poet and seaman who wrote the famous epic Os Lusíados in Macao in the late 1550s. Slauerhoff’s version is set in the twentieth century, with a ship’s radio operator as the main character. After a series of mishaps the radio operator lands at Macao. There he experiences some kind of hallucination that makes him identify with the Portuguese poet who lived three centuries earlier.

(Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1934, 217 pages)

Slauerhoff drew from his experiences as a ship’s doctor in the 1920s when he wrote this spectacular novel set in China. Cameron, an Irish naval radio operator, meets a lieutenant who turns out to be an opium smoker, as well as a mysterious European woman in a Chinese dress, ‘like an overladen fruit tree’. He becomes infatuated by both the woman and opium.