Oek de Jong (born in 1952) is the author of a relatively small, but highly esteemed literary oeuvre of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels: Opwaaiende zomerjurken (Billowing Summerskirts, 1979), Cirkel in het gras (Circle in the Grass, 1985) and Hokwerda's kind (Hokwerda's Child, 2002). His books have sold more than half a million copies. His work has been translated into nine languages. He was awarded the Reina Prinsen Geerligs Prize, the Bordewijk Prize and the Busken Huet Prize, and he was shortlisted for the Libris Prize in Holland and the Golden Owl Award in Belgium.
  As an essayist (trained as an art historian) he has written extensively on the arts. Read below: There you hang, you stupid girl! (essay about Rembrandt).
Oek de Jong is presently working on a cycle of novels.

In der äussersten Finsternis, Piper Verlag, Munich, 2005, translated by Thomas Hauth; La fille de Hokwerda, Editions Gallimard, Paris, 2004, translated by Anita Concas; Hokwerda datter, Gyldendal, Copenhagen, 2004, translated by Tim Kane.

Darkly scintillating romance
In the eighties, Oek de Jong's debut, Opwaaiende zomerjurken (Billowing Summer Frocks), became a genuine cult book for a whole generation of students. It was followed by the beautiful 'Roman' novel Cirkel in het gras (Circle in the Grass), after which silence reigned. The announced publication of De Jong's third novel, Hokwerda's kind, mesmerised the whole literary world in the Netherlands. And rightly so: he has issued a brilliant psychological novel that, at one stroke, has placed him among the foremost Dutch authors.
  In Hokwerda's kind, the writer tells the story of a determined young woman, Lin Hokwerda, who loses herself in love. It is narrated with a broad vision yet with an extraordinary eye for detail. The novel opens with an oppressive scene: as a young girl, Lin Hokwerda is repeatedly thrown into the river by her father, who holds her by one arm and one leg and hurls her into the water that runs behind their house in the Friesian countryside. Every time after the rough splash into the water, she swims back to her father. Again and again she is flung back - until she almost drowns.
  The shadow of this scene hangs above the entire book. With her mother and sister, Lin flees her 'untrustworthy' father at a young age. In her twenties, after a successful but prematurely broken sport career, she meets the man of her dreams. But the pattern of their love resembles that of the opening scene: Lin is consistently cast away by Henri but always comes back. When she meets Jelmer, a mild-mannered lawyer, and again falls in love, it appears, for a moment, that she can eradicate her fatal man from het life. However, she cannot quieten her restlessness and seeks out Henri once more. They explore the boundaries of responsibility, and have an affair. She herself turns out to be untrustworthy, just like her father.
  In Hokwerda's child, De Jong allows his characters to reach the peaks of love in sensual, erotic scenes, banishing all threats for a moment. But, with great stylistic force, De Jong eventually carries Lin and Henri to the 'outer darkness', to the inevitable doom.

65.000 copies sold.

Text: Nederlands Literair Productie-en Vertalingenfonds, Amsterdam (www.nlpvf.nl).

Ein Kreis im Gras, Piper Verlag, Munich, 1999, translated by Thomas Hauth; Un cerc in iarba, Editura Univers, Boecarest, 1991, translated by H.R. Radian; Cirkel i graesset, Gyldendal, Copenhagen, 1988, translated by Tove Kircheiner Galatius; Sirkel i gresset, Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, Oslo, translated by Agnethe Weisser; Kehä sulkeutuu, Kustannusosakeyhtiö Tammi, Helsinki, 1988, translated by Anita Odé; En cirkel i gräset, Norstedts Förlag, Stockholm, 1987, translated by Per Holmer.

Oek de Jong's prime preoccupation, the desire for a harmonious life - whether or not through art - is repeated in this novel set in Italy in the late seventies, gripped by the horror of the kidnap and murder of the politician Aldo Moro. One of its ideas is that whoever strives for a Buddhist approach to life must recognize that good and evil are two sides of the same coin: the Red Brigade on the one side and their capitalist victim on the other.
  This idea is echoed in the book's love story in which the author attempts to resolve the contradictions of independence versus surrender and head versus heart. Andrea Simonetti, an Italian art historian and poet, sees his love affair with Dutch journalist Hanna Piccard floundering.
  The point of view is divided among four characters, and only the author seems finally to triumph. A serious novel of ideas.

150.000 copies sold.

Text: Nederlands Literair Productie-en Vertalingenfonds, Amsterdam (www.nlpvf.nl).

Flatternde Sommerkleider, Piper Verlag, Munich, 2002, translated by Thomas Hauth; Fladdrande sommarklännigar, Norstedts Förlag, Stockholm, 1983, translated by Per Holmer.

A search for harmony
In the first part of Billowing Summer Frocks we are introduced to eight-year-old Edo Mesch during a languid summer in rural Zeeland. He clings to his mother, but he also torments her. His squint keeps him indoors and away from his friends. Angry and proud, he spends his days sailing the imaginary seas with the aid of a rake. As Part Two opens, we watch as 17-year-old Edo gets into a black Citroën DS belonging to an attractive aunt. This is the beginning of a three-week involvement in a depressing triangle. The sensitive boy is now a difficult young man who is doing his best to believe in a philosophical system that can reduce all phenomena to a principle, while yet struggling with his feelings for his aunt.
  At the beginning of the third part, Edo - now 24 years old - is on a ferry in the Mediterranean with his girlfriend Nina. By the time they disembark, the relationship is over. Edo escapes to Rome, but still cannot find peace, instead becoming entangled in erotic relationships, apparently determined to destroy everything around him, and himself in the process. Ultimately this places him in a situation where all his burdens fall from him, leaving only the will to survive.
  This book took the literary world by storm in 1979: it made compulsive reading. The scenes he describes remain indelibly etched on the retina, and, thanks to subtle shifts in perspective, the novel retains its momentum and dynamic to the very end.
  The themes which the author touches upon have earned the book its enduring reputation. Edo is a walking bundle of contradictions. He yearns for love, but walks away as soon as it appears. He wants to be in touch with his feelings, but is forever rationalising. He searches for naturalness, but is the epitome of artificiality. In the end, it is all about achieving harmony. Here the title scene is revealing when Edo, as a boy, is on the back of his mother's bike. They're on a cycle trip, together with a neighbour and her son. He feels the rush of the wind and sees the women's skirts billowing around their legs. An 'incredible sensation of light and space' comes over him. At last, things are all right. 'Everything was simply the way it was. But he was a part of everything and he was floating.'

200.000 copies sold.

Text: Nederlands Literair Productie-en Vertalingenfonds, Amsterdam (www.nlpvf.nl).

It is difficult to define precisely what the term 'essay' means. Montaigne would have been amazed to see how newspaper articles, meditations and even columns, once collected, are suddenly labeled 'essays'. Yet everyone has some idea of what the ideal essay should be: a well thought-out piece, personal but well-informed, in which a thought is unfolded, tested and weighed. Oek de Jong, who occasionally wrote essays in the years when he wasn't working on a new novel, proves that he knows what the essay genre is all about.
  Initially, Een man die in de toekomst springt seems like a collection of travel stories. In the overpowering second story 'The Creation of Adam', the writer kneels down near a mound of dust by a bus-stop in Palermo and prays: 'Bless me, lay your hands on my head and bless me-I need your love. Call me from the bushes where I have retreated.' Slowly the book becomes an account of an attitude to life and the story of a search for forms of religion in a world gone mad. In his essay about the great twentieth-century Flemish poet Paul van Ostaijen (1869-1928), De Jong writes that the exuberant typography of his poetry is 'the reflection of a collapsing world and, at the same time, the only possible response to the catastrophe: a dancing vitality that mocks all laws (...) Van Ostaijen is a man leaping into the future.'
  De Jong reveals deep knowledge in essays on Vermeer, Caravaggio and Caspar David Friedrich, about mysticism, and about the nonsensical idea that 'the novel has no future'. More often than he cares to admit, he turns out to be influenced by the Calvinism he renounced long ago. Later, he sought the altruism of the mystics, with their liberating leap from acting and knowing to non-acting and non-knowing. At present, De Jong finds himself somewhere between the two, and in this he too seems to be the voice of a generation and a time: grown up in the church, later choosing other paths and, towards the end of the century, consciously commuting between two spheres of influence - 'Caspar David Friedrich's longing for symbols and meaning and Francis Bacon's rough and illusionless physicality.'

Some essay have been translated into English and German. For information please contact Augustus.

Text: Nederlands Literair Productie-en Vertalingenfonds, Amsterdam (www.nlpvf.nl).