The narrator of The Sign of Jonah is an ageing writer and one-time playboy living out his twilight years on the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao, painfully aware of his declining physical and mental powers. Nicknamed ‘the professor’, he is regarded with a mixture of awe and contempt by his fellow-islanders, who use him as a walking encyclopedia. He spends his days philosophising in bars, picking up prostitutes, reflecting on his past in Europe and South America and haunted by premonitions of death and doom. Nevertheless he refuses to resign himself and continues to question and rebel, quoting Dylan Thomas’ exhortation to ‘rage against the dying of the light’.


He sails up the coast of Venezuela and Colombia, through the Panama Canal to the fictional country of Balboa, homeland of the rich Juan Carlos and his beautiful, blonde, Viking-like wife Laila, with whom he is infatuated. She is his final challenge and his destiny. In Balboa, he meets the inevitable fugitive Nazi; an orgy in the fabulous brothel of El Farolito ends in the murder of Juan Carlos by his wife and the narrator’s flight.


A valedictory jamboree of eating and drinking to which the narrator invites his friends and cronies results in a final apocalyptic vision of salvation, after which he returns penitently home to his long-suffering wife.


Despite its slow pace, the book has a compelling, hallucinatory quality. Its symbolic dimension effortlessly combines the visionary with the philosophical.

Around me lay many islands, glistening in a new light. And I lay with my arms spread and felt under my cheek the pumping of a heart, grandiose as a millstone; blood gurgled under my hands like a river and I saw the whale’s tail lying on the waves like a cross. And suddenly organ music rose from the water because the whales were singing the song of eternity, so unspeakably great, so reassuring that for the first time in my life I felt taken care of completely. Life, I knew with utter certainty, is a voyage homeward bound. I had been given the sign of Jonah. I had always been a child of God. But what I shall be has been revealed to me on the blue whale’s back. My approaching death will be no more than the shedding of a worn-out shell, the dust will rise up to become equal to Him whom I have seen. And I shall meet again with all those I once loved and there shall be no more mourning, only joy, because Satan’s synagogue has perished with the earth. And I, given back to myself and equal to Him, shall bask in His love in perfect happiness to the end of time, freed of the heavy earth, freed of pain and sorrow. (p. 187-188, tr. André Lefevere)