THE WOOD

About the show

As a child, Jeroen Brouwers spends time in a Japanese POW camp in Indonesia. After the war, he is sent to boarding school in the Netherlands. It’s a prison camp and a concentration camp rolled into one. In his early novel Sunken red, he writes: ‘I do not understand the fundamental difference between a Japanese camp guard and a friar’. Many years later, he writes about these experiences in The wood. Brouwers dips his pen in poison as he portrays a Roman Catholic monastery and boarding school for boys, in which a completely perverted community of males goes about its business with impunity. In 2015, he receives the award for the best literary Dutch-language book for it, the ECI Literatuurprijs.