Sunken Red     by Jeroen Brouwers, Translated by Adrienne Dixon Original title: Bezonken rood Original language: Dutch Original year: 1981 Published by Ivan R. Dee Publisher Pub. Date: 1992 Format: Paperback, 131 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.47 x 8.13 x 5.22 ISBN: 1561310255 Edition: Reprint List Price: $9.95, £7.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £7.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $9.95 Published by New Amsterdam Books Pub. Date: January 1, 1990 Format: Hardcover, 144 pages Dimensions: 0.73 x 8.79 x 5.74 in. ISBN: 0941533190 List Price: $15.95, £11.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £11.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $15.95 Published by Peter Owen Publishers Pub. Date: 1990 Format: 131 pages Not available for ordering Published by New Amsterdam, New York Pub. Date: 1988 Format: 131 pages Not available for ordering

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Sunken Red is the second volume of Brouwers’ trilogy on his country of origin, the former Dutch East Indies colony (present-day Indonesia). The first-person narrator is identified as the author Jeroen Brouwers, who was born in Batavia (now Jakarta) in 1940 and spent the years 1942-45 with his mother in the Japanese internment camp Tjideng, under the sadistic commander Keichi Sone.


Although the theme of a boy in a Japanese camp is reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984), Brouwers’ novel is more closely related to the French nouveau roman. Throughout the novel, the reader is trapped in the narrator’s consciousness. He is now forty-one, his mother has just died and he is tormented by obsessive memories of his early years, as stark images of the Japanese and their brutal treatment of the civilian internees haunt his days and nights. In Holland, this aspect of the novel generated a fierce polemic. At stake was the historical truth of Brouwers’s account and the reality of the Japanese camps rather than the book’s literary merits.


Whereas his mother used to refer to the camp with the simple understatement ‘those terrible years’, the narrator feels he has to carry the burden of those violent memories. Despite all the pills, drink and sex he tries, he finds no redemption for his ‘camp syndrome’. Only hate and desolation are left. Near the end of this raw and often shocking novel, he recounts how his mother is caught trying to steal rice for him and is savagely beaten before his eyes. At that moment his love for her dies and he hates her for the rest of his life. The tragedy, Brouwers appears to say, is that humiliation and suffering can be so total as to destroy every shred of humanity in us.

From that moment I lost my way. My distaste for life, my longing not to exist. From that moment I know that I will always prefer to be alone, with no attachment to anyone or anything, for I do not want to see my love and the beauty I cherish destroyed or damaged. At that moment I thought: now I want a different mother, because this one is broken. (p. 145, tr. Adrienne Dixon)