Adriaan van Dis

Biography

Adriaan van Dis, born in 1946 in Bergen, the Netherlands, made his debut with the novella Nathan Sid, the story of a boy growing up between two cultures: the paradise of colonial Indonesia and the drabness of the Netherlands after the Second World War. Van Dis is interested in cultural clashes, and this fascination permeates his entire oeuvre, from Nathan Sid to his most successful novel, Indische duinen (My Father’s War, 1994). A confrontation between two different cultures is also more than apparent in his travel books, such as In Africa (1991), which deals with the war in Mozambique. In his novel Familieziek (Repatriated, 2002) Van Dis recounts the humorous and moving story of a boy who grows up in a family repatriated to the Netherlands from Indonesia, and who remains an outsider despite his endearing attempts to integrate. De wandelaar (The Walker, 2007) is his last novel to date. Van Dis currently lives in Paris.

Titles

My Father’s War

(Indische duinen, 1994)

The autobiographical nature of Adriaan van Dis’s work can be partly deduced from the fact that the surname of the main character in his debut novella, Nathan Sid, is an anagram of his own. Like his character Nathan Sid, Adriaan van Dis had a father who came from the former Dutch East Indies and lived in a house full of repatriated people in the dunes near the Dutch town of Bergen aan Zee. Continued...

Family Fray

(Familieziek, 2002)

Adriaan van Dis’s Indonesian family background has played a major role in many of his novels, including Indische duinen (My Father’s War), which has been translated into many languages. With Familieziek, he has produced a minor masterpiece that is already being hailed as a ‘classic’ in the Dutch press. As the subtitle ‘a novel in scenes’ indicates, Familieziek consists of short episodes from the life of a family repatriated from Indonesia to the Netherlands. Continued...

The Walker

(De wandelaar, 2007)

Mr Mulder seems to all appearances to be a upstanding gentleman, gliding through life, impeccably dressed, aloof to the hustle and bustle of the world around him. Because of a sizeable inheritance he can afford to idle away his time, and so he leaves Holland for Paris, where he leads an anonymous, solitary existence. One night he witnesses a dramatic fire in a building occupied by illegal immigrants and transients. People throw themselves out of windows in blind panic, as the crowd below looks on helplessly. Continued...