Jan Siebelink

Biography

Jan Siebelink (b. 1938) grew up as the son of a nurseryman in an orthodox Protestant milieu. He studied French, became interested in ‘decadent’ literature, in particular J.-K. Huysmans’s novel À rebours, which he translated, and taught French in secondary school for over thirty years. His literary debut, Nachtschade (Nightshade, 1975), attracted attention because of the dark-romantic obsession with decay death and religion. In the big novels he wrote subsequently - De herfst zal schitterend zijn (Autumn Will Be Wonderful, 1980), En joeg de vossen door het staande koren (And Chased the Foxes through the Upright Wheat, 1982) and De overkant van de rivier (The Other Side of the River, 1990) - he gave an increasingly penetrating shape to his universe: the nursery as the image of paradise lost, the gloomy faith of his father, secondary-school education, the social order, and above all the years of his youth in the countryside where he was born. He went on to publish the novels Vera (1997), Engelen van het duister (Angels of the Dark, 2001) and Margaretha (2002). In 2005 Siebelink’s highly acclaimed novel Knielen op een bed violen (Kneeling on a Bed of Violets) appeared, for which he was awarded the AKO Literature Prize.

Titles

Vera

(Vera, 1997)

Through eighty tightly-orchestrated scenes, we follow the life of a woman who, at the end of the book – when we have arrived in the present – is about forty-five and sits alone outside a café overlooking the beach near The Hague. Vera Melchers-Dornseiffer is a former Dutch teacher, a wife and a mother. Her whole life she has considered her aloofness to be the secret of her attractiveness. Continued...

Kneeling on a Bed of Violets

(Knielen op een bed violen, 2005)

After writing for thirty years, Jan Siebelink is experiencing an unprecedented triumph with Knielen op een bed violen (Kneeling on a Bed of Violets). Since its publication this book has dominated the bestseller lists and has been awarded the AKO Literature Prize. According to a Flemish critic, Siebelink’s magnificent reaches the soul of ‘la Hollande profonde’. Continued...

Suezkade

(Suezkade, 2008)

Just as in his best-selling Kneeling on a Bed of Violets, Jan Siebelink again returned to his rigidly devout youth in a village on the banks of the River IJssel, so in his new, voluminous novel Suezkade he revisits familiar territory. In the story of Marc Cordesius, a young French teacher at the Descartes College in The Hague, the reader will recognize many elements from his earlier novels and stories with a secondary school as their setting, which is hardly a surprise since the author taught French at the Marnix College in Ede for twenty-five years. Continued...