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After making a name for himself as a travel writer with books such as Het beloofde land (The Promised Land) and In Afrika (In Africa), he sealed his reputation with the award-win­ning bestseller Indische duinen (My Father’s War, 1994). His later novels such as Familieziek (Family Fray, 2004), De wandelaar (The Walker, 2007) and Tikkop (Betrayal, 2010) have all sold well and received glowing reviews. His novel Ik kom terug (I Will Return) (2014) received the 2015 Libris Literature Prize. That same year he received the Constantijn Huygens Prize for his entire body of work. In 2017, he published De Zuid-Afrikaboeken (The South Africa Books) and the novel In het buitengebied (In the Hinterland). Van Dis’ books have been translated into many different languages.

Adriaan van Dis

From that day on Mulder finds himself with a new pet: a dog which survived the fire has adopted him. Mulder tries to shake him off, but the dog follows him everywhere. The dog seems to mirror the suppressed, instinctive side of Mulder’s personality: everything the man shies away from, the dog seeks out. The animal also has an infallible memory for the people he knew before, and he opens up a new world for Mulder.

Adriaan van Dis is a master of self-effacement, and ironizes in a subtle manner the yearning to ‘do something’ about the suffering in the world. He has succeeded in writing a novel that rubs the reader’s nose in today’s news.

In searching for the cause of the fire, Mulder encounters a motley group of characters, like the whisky-soaked priest Bruno, a onelegged beggar woman and a taciturn Chinese who is never without his pull-cart. Mulder also starts to develop warm feelings for Sri, a mysterious woman he wants to save from the life of an illegal immigrant with a fake passport. But she is less than thrilled by his offers of help. ‘I want to live my life without feeling guilty,’ she says. ‘Me too,’ he replies. ‘That’s why I want to help you.’ But all Mulder’s attempts to do the right thing come to naught.He is a believer without a god, a man committed to the idea of ‘doing a little good’. But his ideals are no match for a city teeming with unrest and racial hatred, where riots in the banlieus are an ever-present threat to society. De wandelaar (The Walker) is a powerful, socially aware novel as well as an emotionally involving story of a loner who tries to give his life meaning in an ever more extreme world.

'De wandelaar' is a witness to powerlessness and anger, and yet also of empathy with the tormented metropolitan society in the Western world. algemeen dagblad A topical novel that poses urgent questions. The unity of time and place ensures that the narrative remains compact, while the pace and fluent style do the rest.

The fact that 'De wandelaar' emerges as an invigorating reading experience is due to the deft style that is Van Dis’s trade mark. Smooth sentences, elegant and acute phrasing, apt characterization, it’s all there.

Book

Fiction

De wandelaar

Mr Mulder seems to all appearances to be a upstanding gentleman, gliding through life, impeccably dressed, aloof to the hustle and bustle of the world around him. Because of a sizeable inheritance he can afford to idle away his time, and so he leaves Holland for Paris, where he leads an anonymous, solitary existence. One night he witnesses a dramatic fire in a building occupied by illegal immigrants and transients. People throw themselves out of windows in blind panic, as the crowd below looks on helplessly.

The Walker

Nathan Sid reveals a boy who is caught between oriental rice and Dutch potatoes. He was conceived over there but came into the world in the Netherlands. The rest of the family shares a Dutch East Indies past but he doesn’t belong anywhere. Where the perspective gave his debut novella a touch of pathos, looking back on that same remarkably split childhood from the perspective of his fonies leads Van Dis now to a harder confrontation. The immediate cause is the death of one of his three half.sisters which brings the large and confusing family back together. The main character’s father, a strict soldier, died long ago, when his son was only eleven. For a long time he had hated and feared him, because of the daily beatings he had received. Now the son is a grown man and he tries to find out what made his family tick. It turns out that his father’s cruelty was the result of his own loveless childhood and a war trauma. The son is obliged to modify his feelings of hate.

Van Dis portrays the mad members of his family with an honesty which is as cruel as it is loving, and the result is a subtle self portrait which is definitely more than just flattering.

The scoresettling which this book at first seems to be, turns into a document of affection from a second generation victim, but without the hate being blunted. That is Van Dis’s tour de force: he wants the truth to shatter the lies that surrounded his childhood while, at the same time, admitting how much he resembles his father. Merciless and stylistically refined, the writer Van Dis remains just as divided as his main character and this is what makes the novel so fascinating. The stories, rumours and scandals are very like those which inspired Louis Couperus to write a number of great East Indian-Dutch novels. Too many books about fathers and sons deteriorate into laments which force the reader into the role of listening psychiatrist. Van Dis elevates the private to the universal; his novel unravels the complexes which are shared by many who have emigrated or been repatriated.

Such authenticity is rare: it can readily be called a personal and literary victory.

All these things make 'Indische duinen' exciting, as does the way Van Dis venomously and stylistically lashes out at unexpected moments.

Indische duinen

The autobiographical nature of Adriaan van Dis’s work can be partly deduced from the fact that the surname of the main character in his debut novella, 'Nathan Sid', is an anagram of his own. Like his character Nathan Sid, Adriaan van Dis had a father who came from the former Dutch East Indies and lived in a house full of repatriated people in the dunes near the Dutch town of Bergen aan Zee.

My Father’s War

The author’s relationship with his mother was always troubled. Critical rather than tender, she refused to open herself up to others and never talked about the past. It was unclear whether this was simply her nature or the fallout from her wartime ordeals and her difficult marriage.The mother in I Will Return clings to her secrets and threatens to take them to the grave with her, while the author is intent on getting at the truth. The two enter into an almost Faustian pact: he will be allowed to take on the role of journalist and pry into her past if he promises to help her end her life. With her 100th birthday approaching, she feels she has nothing left to live for, though plenty still remains unsaid.The first part of the memoir takes place after the author’s two sisters have died. His mother, now in a rest home, comes across as distant and heartless, even refusing to talk about her two dead daughters, and dwelling on her own suffering: fleeting impressions of hard times, long years of loneliness and condemnation of her mixed marriage.

Fascinating stories, memories, glimpses, images that make a deep impression on the reader. This uncomfortable portrait, wrestled from his past, his mother and most of all from himself, shows Adriaan van Dis at his literary best.

The mother is shrewd, controlling and manipulative with her son in the way she gives and withholds information. Van Dis writes beautifully on the subject of remem­bering and forgetting, words that ring with insight and emotion even when they come from his reluctant mother’s lips. ‘That’s old age,’ she said. ‘Your character doesn’t wear away as you get older, it condenses, the essence rises to the surface. We are all reduced to the stock cube of our own soup.’I Will Return is an exceptionally coura­geous book about mothers and sons, about war and coming to terms with life and with death. While the narrator sees death as the end, it is the mother’s firm belief in reincar­nation that gives the book its title. In a dreamlike closing sequence, the deceased mother does indeed return.<ul><li>Winner of Libris Literature Prize 2015</li></ul>

Ik kom terug

Adriaan van Dis has explored his family history before but never so unflinchingly as in this memoir. In the final phase of his mother’s life she is at last prepared to talk about living through three wars and the death of her first husband, beheaded in a Japanese internment camp. Adriaan van Dis pieces together her past and his own in a brave and uncompromising book.

I Will Return

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Adriaan van Dis

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The Walker

My Father’s War

I Will Return