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His debut, the story collection Het mes op de keel (The Knife to the Throat, 1964), and the novel Joris Ockeloen en het wachten (Joris Ockeloen and the Waiting, 1967) went scarcely noticed in the Dutch literary world. That ended in 1973 with the publication of the novella Zonder trommels en trompetten (Without Fanfare) in which Brouwers weaves his thematic web on death, love, loss and the past that is to inform his later work, such as the novel Zonsopgangen boven zee (Sunrises at Sea, 1977), which was a great critical success.AutobiographicalBrouwers’s work has strong autobiographical elements, such as in the sketches Groetjes uit Brussel (Greetings from Brussels, 1969), in the polemical novel Het verzonkene (The Submerged, 1979, awarded with the Multatuli Prize) and in Bezonken rood (Sunken Red, 1981). He has written caustic and witty polemic tracts against literary currents or authors whose integrity he calls into question. De laatste deur (The Final Door, 1983), essays on suicides in Dutch-language literature, was reprinted three times within a year. Alongside his other essay and letter collections of 1976-1986, entitled Kroniek van een karakter I &amp; II (Chronicle of a Character I &amp; II, 1986-87), the novels Winterlicht (Winter Light, 1984), De Zondvloed (The Deluge, 1988, awarded with the F. Bordewijk Prize) and Zomervlucht (Summer Flight, 1990) appeared. In the decade to follow he published a number of essay collections and his own literary journal, Feuilletons.His novel Geheime kamers (Secret Rooms, 2000) was unexpected but became a resounding success. It met with unanimous praise and won the Flemish Golden Owl Award, the AKO Literature Prize 2001 and the Multatuli Prize. In 2007 Brouwers was awarded the prestigious three-yearly Dutch Literature Prize (Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren) for his entire oeuvre.With Het hout (The Wood, 2014), the first Dutch novel on child sexual abuse in the catholic church, Brouwers won the ECI Literature Prize. In 2018 he has been awarded an honorary doctorate at the Radboud University of Nijmegen. Client E. Busken (2020) was awarded the Libris Literature Prize 2021.

Sunken Red

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Jeroen Brouwers

Client E. Busken – because patients no longer exist in the Dutch healthcare sys­ tem – is furious. Furious with his mother, furious with the staff of Villa Madeleine, the nursing home to which he has been admitted against his will, furious with the other residents. His angry outburst at the paramedics who brought him to this final station in his life were the last words he spoke – ever since, he’s been silent.Busken pretends to be deaf and dumb so that he can ignore the patronizing staff who are treating him like an infant and depriving him of all privacy. He who, by his own account, was a neurosurgeon, a paleogeneticist, a Latin scholar, a robot­ ics engineer. Or maybe just a mailroom employee – we never find out for sure. ‘I’m losing track of things,’ Busken admits. He is a rather unreliable omniscient narrator – whether because of his forgetfulness or because he’s deliberately wrongfooting the reader in an act of rebellion against the outside world, which has robbed him of his freedom. His rich use of language serves as a testament to his erudition, but ‘like pearls slipping off a string, one by one words are beginning to escape [him].’In this novel, which describes one day in the life of the snarling protagonist, we are taken along on his endless, confused but often witty train of thought, sus­ pended between the present and the past, with fragmented memories of both true events and likely invented characters. There’s an encounter with a young new caregiver who fires up Busken’s imagina­ tion, one or two sanitary accidents, a few meddlesome fellow clients, a barbecue at the end of the day and the constant craving for a cigarette. Apart from that, nothing much happens – Busken is wait­ ing for death.If this ends up being his final book, it will be a phenomenal finish to Brouwers’ career. He treats the reader to a story that brings to mind the greats of world litera­ ture: Joyce’s stream-­of-consciousness and single­day narrative, Proust’s polyphony of inner voices (with the name of the nursing home, Villa Madeleine, being an explicit reference), Svevo’s cigarette motif, the misanthropy of Canetti’s Kien.

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Brouwers lets us ride the waves of his thoughts, and in so doing manages – and this merits special praise – to effortlessly captivate us. The language is as rich and dense as poetry, and every bit as fluid.

A monument of language.

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Cliënt E. Busken

At eighty years old, Brouwers once again manages to surprise readers with an extraordinary book, funny and wry at the same time, about the decline of a man with dementia who spends his final days confined to a wheelchair in the Villa Madeleine nursing home.

Client E. Busken

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