Jeroen Brouwers

Jeroen Brouwers

Sunken Red

Nowadays it is hard to imagine that the publication of Jeroen Brouwers’s 'Sunken Red' (1981) sparked such controversy in the Dutch press. Another Dutch writer who, like Brouwers, had spent some of his childhood as a prisoner of the Japanese in Indonesia during World War II wrote that Brouwers had stretched the truth: it had not been as bad as Brouwers described in his book.