"Sunken Red" was the first novel of the Dutch writer Jeroen Brouwers (° 1940) I read, so I could finally imagine how controversial this author can be. You can read this book as a sharp indictment against the atrocities the Japanese military commited in the Second World War, in the prisoner camps in Indonesia when that country was a Dutch colony. So this is interesting as an historical document, and when it was published in 1981 it provoked quite a stir, as Brouwers intended (he was especially indignant about the way the victims themselves laughed away their time in the camps).

But this little novel is also about Brouwers himself, more specifically about his reaction to the news of the death of his mother, with whom he was imprisoned in a Japanese camp. Brouwers had broken with his mother, years before her death, and his first reaction was: "so what?"; but you can see him wrestling with this apathy, and the very different feelings he has about his mother and her departing. Endearing.

A third layer in the book is the struglle of Brouwers against all the negative sides of his personality, and there are quite a lot of them. Brouwers has put them plainly on paper, for everybody to see. Quite disturbing. I had some difficulty with this, not because of the ego-focus, but because of the radical psychologizing that is typical for the Dutch literature since the second world war. A psychiatrist can find all this interesting enough, for me it was just a bit too much.

Finally, as a literary document, this booklet sometimes is very uneven, with rather roughly written chapters and others that are beautifully poetical. So, this didn't completely captivate me, but his next novel, [b:De Zondvloed|2694762|De Zondvloed|Jeroen Brouwers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1314725195l/2694762._SY75_.jpg|2720091] was a direct hit.