Sunken Red by Jeroen Brouwers

Sunken Red swirls around the author's memories of his time in a Japanese concentration camp in Indonesia when he was five years old. I once wrote a long poem about all the funerals I had been to in Holland because they are so especially gray and bleak. Jeroen Brouwers, however, has written an entire book about a funeral in Holland he didn't attend, that of his mother long after he had lost contact with her. His mother and her death are used for metaphor and symbol but we don't really grasp who she is at all.

When I complained to my father the bleakness of this book he said that Dutch literature seems to be either about boredom or sexual perversion or both. There is definitely a certain amount of each in this book, lots of Oedipal complex passages, lots of reference to women's blood - a kind of study of a man's tormented relationship to woman that makes you really, really jumpy. He says that as a child he saw men raping and beating women so he thought that was what you were supposed to do to them - uh oh!! However he is careful to say this has all left him very hard and unable to love, and luckily he doesn't seem to be enacting any kind of nasty behaviour on anyone. He is after all, as the biography describes him on the cover, a "distinguished Dutch man of letters".

This status appears self-consciously from time to time when he writes things such as "With the receiver in my ear, one hand on my penis, I thought: I learn that my mother has died when I am just as naked as I was when I was born of that mother, almost forty-one years ago. By literary criteria it is trash, but I did think it." You can't help thinking relax Jeroen! Just write the thought in a way that isn't trashy instead of futzing about it. When he repeats thoughts (symbols or metaphors usually) he often places them in quotations, perhaps so we know he intended the repetition. Well, this is a translation, maybe I can blame the translator Adrienne Dixon for those pretentions.

What I did respect in this book (I can hardly say I enjoyed it) was that his description of camp life feels so entirely true. He complains "I have never known those who lived through that hell to speak of the Japanese camps in a tone other than one of affection and even nostalgia, and that may have contributed to the impression outsiders have that 'it couldn't have been all that bad'. The literature about the Japanese camps is scant, and consists mainly of understatements, because the writers were afraid of tears and pathos." Accusations of other cowardly writers aside, I did find Brouwers' tale of camp life chilling and honest, and unfailingly realistic.

I've overheard comments in my father's family about certain members who received compensation for their suffering during the war, people saying "she didn't suffer at all where she was - why did she get that money?". My feeling was that no one could compensate any of them enough and this book backs me up in that opinion. Again, war sucks.

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