Books

Authors

Directory of Translators

Grants Awarded

Grants

Discover

About the Foundation

Catalogues

Contact

An overview of recent highlights, by genre

Discover authors, by genre

Download publications here

Books & Authors

Find a translator in database of accredited literary translators.

How to get accredited as a literary translator

Sign Up as a Translator

Translators

Translation Database

Discover who we are and what we do

Frequently Asked Questions

Discover everything the Dutch Foundation for Literature is organizing

Programs

An overview of recently awarded translation grants

Departments and staff

Get in touch

Boven is het stil has been translated into 24 languages. In 2013 Bakker also won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (precursor of the International Booker) for The Detour. He then concentrated on non-fiction, but has now released his first novel in more than a decade. He is also a gardener.

Gerbrand Bakker

Meanwhile the twins, Kees and Klaas, try to support their little brother, but they too are victims of a situation in which nothing can be taken for granted any longer. In this dark and shaky world, Gerson worries about his life and his sexuality.Without any over-dramatization, the events head almost casually towards a tragic conclusion. Bakker shifts the perspective between Gerson and his brothers. The twins speak as one, further underlining Gerson’s isolated position. This book calmly shows how, from one day to the next, life can become hopeless. This cool inevitability is what makes the story so heartrending.

Book

Fiction

Perenbomen bloeien wit

A family is turned upside down when their mother leaves. Then the youngest son, Gerson, loses his eyesight in an accident, and the balance is disturbed even more. The father feels guilty – he was driving the car and failed to give way.

Pear Trees Blossom White

The Kaan family, to which the mother and child belong, is central to the rest of the book. Forty years on, Anna Kaan has ensconced herself in the straw on the top floor of the old barn, with a bottle of advocaat and a packet of her favourite biscuits.Granddaughter Dieke, five years old, wonders why grandma refuses to come down. Bit by bit, from continually changing perspectives, the reader learns about the drama that took place on the day of the royal visit. Anna’s two-year-old daughter was run over by the village baker and killed. Interior monologues reveal how each of the characters experienced that day and how it affected the rest of their lives.Now, in baking hot weather, two of the three brothers are tidying the little girl’s grave. They all seem to have failed in life. Klaas, the eldest son and the only one married with a child, does practically nothing these days. The cows have gone and the farmhouse is slowly falling apart for lack of repairs. The youngest son, Johan, speaks slowly and uninhibitedly as the result of a motorcycle accident. Son Jan, in some ways the central figure in the book, has moved away to live on the island of Texel.

The portrayal of the Kaan family is impressive, not to say deeply moving. […] June is a heartrending novel, with a tone entirely its own.

As the day nears its end, father and sons make one final attempt to get mother down from the hayloft, but only the empty advocaat bottle ends up on the ground floor. Johan is returned to his sheltered apartment. Jan catches the train for the ferry home, although he seems to be having second thoughts.Bakker’s concise, sometimes rather languid style is used to great effect in evoking the world of a village in North Holland forty years ago: porridge for breakfast, the baker’s new Volkswagen van, the children dressed in hand-knitted cardigans for the queen’s visit.As in Boven is het stil (The Twin), Juni has a farm setting, so little is said and emotions are never expressed. Bakker’s unemotional style guards against sentimentality – we are after all dealing with the death of a child – without being any the less moving for that. We see family relationships that have run aground, leaving nothing but incomprehension and stifled rage, but as in his debut there are moments to make us laugh or smile.

Bakker once again proves himself a master at creating atmosphere. Abundant sensuous details pervade the reader’s consciousness: the mother’s hips that shrink and grow on her bicycle saddle, the swallows flying soundlessly in and out, the damp concrete floor that heralds a shower of rain. […] Bakker is and remains every inch a writer.

Juni

'Juni' (‘June’), the second novel by Gerbrand Bakker, begins astonishingly enough from the perspective of the former Dutch queen, Juliana, who on 17 June 1969 paid a working visit to the district of Wieringerwaard. Queen Juliana, known for occasionally breaking with protocol, abruptly turns her attention to a woman and child arriving late, by bicycle.

June

The reason for her move abroad gradually becomes clear: her husband is trying to track her down. Having confessed to an affair with one of her students in Amsterdam, she has quietly escaped to Wales. Her husband contacts the police and teams up with a detective to go and look for her. They board the ferry to Hull on Christmas Eve. However, in the meantime, the woman increasingly seems to be losing her grip on the situation.The four novels that Gerbrand Bakker has written to date are about people who are searching for isolation, but are unable to detach themselves from the world around them. The question is also whether they entirely understand themselves – the writer merely shows what happens and leaves any conclusions to the reader. It’s all about what goes on between the lines – in Bakker’s previous novels, and now in De omweg too. With his fine style and gripping plot twists, this is a writer who ultimately grabs his readers by the throat.

If there’s one thing Bakker really understands, it’s how to depict real life, faltering, failing life.

A beautiful, oddly moving work of fiction, a quiet read that lingers long in the mind, like the ghosts that linger in our homes, and in the land around us.

De omweg

A Dutch woman, who is a university English lecturer, rents a farm in remote, rural Wales, where she is carrying out research into the work of Emily Dickinson. She intends to demonstrate that some of Dickinson’s poems were not of the same high standard as her other work. When she arrives, there are ten geese living on the farm, but they disappear, one by one. Perhaps it’s the work of a local fox.

The Detour

n Jasper and His Servant, author Gerbrand Bakker described his move from Amsterdam to the mountainous German Eifel, the process of restoring a house, taming the garden, getting to know his neighbours, and adopting Jasper, a stray dog whose servant he promptly became. But now the servant is alone. Jasper may have been more of a nuisance than anything else, however, the void left by his death renders the author’s life meaningless and, before long, his loneliness unfolds into a deep depression.Bakker experiences and contemplates as a writer, jotting down the everyday with searing honesty, ruthlessly portraying himself and those around him. Trading between Eifel and Amsterdam, he describes a chemical darkness that began with an anxiety-ridden road trip to Greece, interweaves conversations and memories of relationships and romances with different men, and runs up against misunderstanding from his family and friends. He gardens, goes back and forth with his sexologists, reflecting on love and desire (and his lack of it). As in Jasper, the battle with self-hate and the need for the structure and labour of writing are ever-present. Across 87 short chapters, the contours of Bakker’s depression emerge through the many small details that envelop it:A better characterisation of a depression is the word nothing. No man’s land. There is nothing, you are nothing. You are not in touch with yourself, not with your thoughts, not with your feelings, not with your body, not with others.With a style reminiscent of Knausgaard’s autofiction, Servant, Alone presents an absorbing portrait of a writer’s struggle with an invisible, ineffable condition. His prose is exact, rarely if ever figurative, powerfully evoking loneliness and longing, while at other times tender or wickedly humorous. Or as the jury of the International Dublin Literary Award aptly noted: ‘His writing is wonderful: restrained and clear […]. There are intriguing ambiguities, but no false notes.’

This isn’t therapeutic writing. Bakker experiences, thinks and records because he is a writer, not because he wants to resolve something […] He describes as best as he can only that which is most meaningful in his life… Honest, investigative, critical and intimate.

If this is the form in which Bakker’s writing fits best (and I think it is), part of you hopes, harsh though it may be, that his self-exploration is not finished yet.

Non-Fiction

After achieving international fame as a novelist with 'The Twin' (International Dublin Literary Award 2010) and 'The Detour', Gerbrand Bakker made his autobiographical debut with Jasper and 'His Servant' in 2016. Now, the author returns with a mesmerising sequel, building on his fictional oeuvre to present an intimate life become novel. Recording and recollecting everything with a precise pen and wry humour, he searches for answers: Where does his depression spring from? And how can he overcome it?

Servant, Alone

More Gerbrand Bakker

Author

Privacy statement

post@letterenfonds.nl