Nicolaas Matsier

Beetje vreemd, heel fragmentarisch geschreven boek over Johan van Oldenbarnevelt. Het beschrijft het proces tegen hem, in 1618-1619. En zijn executie.
In kleine stukjes wordt het proces beschreven, de manier waarop hij wordt ondervraagd zonder de precieze aanklacht te kennen. Zijn verweer. Door de regels heen wordt zijn loopbaan beschreven op een zodanige manier dat de man zelf wat bekender wordt. De verhouding met Maurits, de stadhouder, de geschilpunten tussen hen, de remonstranties en de contraremonstranten, de Synode van Dordrecht, het wordt allemaal wat duidelijker door dit boek. Ondanks de wat stroeve manier van beschrijven toch een leesbaar verhaal, interessant ook.… (más)

Gesloten huis. Zelfportret met ouders (Engl. "Closed home. Self-portrait with parents"), is a reflective and unpretentious novel. After the death of the parents, the children, the narrator, Tjit Reinsma, is one of them, come to clear out the home: all the furniture, possessions, books, papers and diaries of the deceased parents must removed. Various possessions, photos, and objects, recall memories, not only in the narrator in the story, but also in the reader. Remembered stories of the parents war-time experience, finding food and kindling during the cold "hunger winter", in the last year of the war, 1944, walking all over North-Holland, are memories shared by many people in that province.

There are many tender memories in the book: recognizable for anyone who grew up in the Netherlands between 1960 and 1980; household items, brand names of typical products. The novel is a warehouse of Dutch cultural images of the Twentieth Century.

The life of the Tjit Reinsma mirrors the life of many Dutch contemporaries, particularly the lives of the baby-boomers, many of whom have suffered a form of manic depression. After clearing out the parents home, Tjit turns to clean out his own home, to deal with the ghosts in his own life. The hardest task are the removal of the parents diaries, and papers he wrote during his depression. They do not only describe the siblings earliest youth, but also the family mystery: the tragedy that had been shrouded, and was never talked about, buried in the mists of the past. The post-war welfare state brought affluence and prevented unnecessary deaths, as for instance the death of children at an early age, as could still happen during the early Fifties. These lost and painful experiences, the knowledge of what had happened to the two siblings of the narrator, Jan and Rita, when he was only five years old, a truth he can barely face.

Gesloten huis. Zelfportret met ouders was first published in 1994. He gave the main character his real name: Tjit Reinsma. Reinsma was born in Krommenie, as small town in North-Holland.… (más)