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His first two books appeared under the pseudonym Patrizio Canaponi: the short-story collection Een gondel in de Herengracht (A Gondola in the Herengracht, 1978; Anton Wachter Prize 1979) and the novel De draaideur (The Revolving Door, 1979). Van der Heijden won national fame with De tandeloze tijd (The Toothless Time), a brilliant seven-volume saga about Amsterdam in the seventies and eighties, published between 1983 and 1996. In 2003 De Movo Tapes appeared, the first volume of a new cycle of novels, entitled Homo duplex, followed by Het schervengericht (Judgement by Shards, 2007).The last few years have been turbulent and tragic for Van der Heijden. In 2011 his only child Tonio was killed in a road accident and precisely a year later he published an autobiographical novel, an impressive picture of his son that is imbued with his regret at never having been the father he wanted to be. Tonio was awarded the Libris Literature Prize and the Readers’ Prize, and this year the author received the ultimate Dutch literary honour, the P.C. Hooft Prize.

A.F.Th. van der Heijden

Early on the morning of 23 May, 2010, Whit Sunday, Tonio van der Heijden, the only son of the writer and his wife, Mirjam Rotenstreich, was killed in a traffic accident. He was only 21 years old. It was a pointless event without any real culprits – Tonio had had a drink, he didn’t give way on his bike, and the driver of the car that hit him was going a little too fast. In just one moment, this combination of circumstances turned the life of Tonio’s parents into hell.Almost immediately after receiving the news about their son – the doorbell shrieks through the hallway and two police officers inform them about the accident and Tonio’s critical condition – Van der Heijden starts his own recon- struction of events, at first unconsciously, and later deliber- ately, in perfectly honed sentences that hit home, sharp as knives.And yet Tonio is a novel. Not because Van der Heijden, with a cool detachment, probes into the smallest details of the ill-fated circumstances. Not even because this book is a razor-sharp, emotional and personal reconstruction of his son’s life. Van der Heijden pulls no punches: he spares no one and nothing, least of all himself, and so his work carves deeply into the reader’s soul.No, this is a real novel because of the relentless way in which the author pushes the developments and brings them to their inevitable conclusion, interweaving the heartbreaking present with the horror of the accident. The composition of Tonio is raw, immediate, full of repetition, circular trains of thought, dark shortcuts and false trails – and so it represents the blueprint of mourning.

A monument to love and suffering: the author A.F.Th. van der Heijden has written a requiem for his son. Tonio is one of the most powerful, compelling expressions of the human spirit in the face of its opposite, death and the void.

The conclusion of Tonio takes the reader’s breath away. Because of the visit to the site of the accident, against the backdrop of a celebrating city. Because of the gradual revelation of the true nature of the relationship between Tonio and the enigmatic Jenny. But primarily because of the passage in which Van der Heijden uses his words to accompany his son on that fateful night, for the very last time. Warning him. Talking to him. Gently attempting, in fiction, to make him go the other way and come home safely: ‘I beg you: turn left.’This is the cruel paradox of Tonio. None of the artist’s weapons misses its target. Van der Heijden, increasingly mercilessly, nails his readers to their seats. But his son, his ‘best piece of prose’, will never return to him.

The pages on which Van der Heijden watches his son’s last cycle ride with a loving, anxious gaze, and his powerless attempts to protect him from that ugly death, are among the most beautiful things that anyone could write. It’s obscene, but true.’

The most touching book he has ever written, a tribute to his son, a quest for the fragile essence of parenthood.

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Tonio

A.F.Th. van der Heijden already had a number of ‘requiems’ to his name: for a childhood sweetheart, a cousin who died in an accident, his father, his mother and a good friend. He has proven himself able to use the subject of death to lend meaning to their lives, with great retroactive force. Looking back, these books were merely the prelude to his most recent ‘requiem novel’, a hefty book that overshadows everything that came before: 'Tonio'.

Although a series of books in which everything connects up organically is typical of Van der Heijden, his new saga is fundamentally different. Homo duplex does not look back at a recent past but takes place in an imagined near future. In addition endows his hero with distinctly mythical traits. In Homo duplex A.F.Th will recreate the myth of Oedipus in modern times, not by following Sophocles’ tragedy step by step, but by using the elements of the myth to create a sparkling new story.The name of A.F.Th.‘s modern Oedipus is Tibbolt Satink, born after his mother has a bizarre traffic accident on a car-free Sunday. Tibbolt, soon sure of his own special nature, seeks a transformation. He is convinced that he can saddle someone else with his death, but to do this he must himself first become someone else.The story of Tibbolt/Movo is told in two intertwining narratives. One narrative has a character who can be identified as Apollo. This character, who will later adorn himself with the code name QX-Q-8, recounts how he was able to track down a box of cassette tapes in the basement archives of an Amsterdam publishing house after Movo’s death. The tapes have deteriorated because of moisture and dirt, and QX-Q-8 has them restored in a laboratory; so that he can listen to Movo’s spoken notes for the book about his amazing transformation: A career as someone else.

There is not one author in the Dutch language who equals A.F.Th. in magically transforming these high-flown philosophical theories into such sparkling prose, quivering with life.

In the other story Tibbolt Satink himself speaks in raw, pointed monologues. He records these monologues on a dictaphone, sitting behind the steering wheel of his car. Agitated by the high speed, he philosophises freely about time, the state of the planet, the organization of a worldwide strike, and his own life. Tibolt carries on a striking and constant inner dialogue on the tapes with Movo, his ‘better self.’The tirades remind us of the famous stream of consciousness in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Satink – aware of this link – speaks of a ‘scream of consciousness.’ A.F.Th lets this scream reverberate with incredible imagination and stylistic power in an explosion of language that dizzies you and leaves you waiting tensely for the following volumes.

'The Movo Tapes' is a very special book, chockfull of overwhelming verbal fireworks – even if it’s primarily beginnings, promises, and announcements of what is still to come in the rest of the series.

Actually it’s shamelessly over the top, that’s plain as the nose on your face. But at the same time it is so well written, and with so much talent, that all possible objections are pushed away by all the qualities that are present in the text. A balancing act of the kind that one seldom encounters.

De Movo Tapes

After seven years of silence A.F.Th. van der Heijden has published 'De Movo' Tapes, the ‘zeroth’ volume of the Homo duplex – ‘split human’ – series that, according to a list of titles in the front of the book, will extend over nine volumes.

The Movo Tapes

Repetition is the Hell, it leads to boredom and indifference which destroy the purity of the individual moment. This is also the case in the imaginary world in which Benny Wult and Gini Trades are born, meet one another, and are doomed to die. It is a world in which life lasts only a single day and each event occurs only once, but is therefore grandiose and unique. ‘Our lives and the love they contain take their great intensity from this uniqueness.’In fact, the pursuit of the uniqueness of each moment is an allegory of the ‘life at full stretch’ which Albert Egberts, the hero of The Toothless Time, attempts to lead. Benny and Gini make love in almost divine fashion and are tempted to surrender to the opposite of their belief: to succumb to the Hell, to repetition, because they feel the ‘divine flame’ burning within them and cannot accept that it will immediately expire. Mayfly is a cruel and tender love story.

Het leven uit een dag

‘L’enfer c’est la répétition,’ is the motto of Ionesco at the beginning of the small, symbolic novel 'Mayfly' (1988).

Mayfly

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