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Zuiderzee
Roman over de inpoldering van de Zuiderzee en de invloed daarvan op het leven van Urker vissers, in het bijzonder dat van de vrienden Auke en Theun, die een homoseksuele verhouding hebben met elkaar.
271 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1934
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21 people want to read
About the author
Jef Last
40 books5 followersJosephus Carel Franciscus (Jef) Last (The Hague, 2 May 1898 – Laren, 15 February 1972) was a Dutch poet and writer.
Last was a member of the Social-Democratic Party (SDAP) but later joined the Revoltionary Socialist Party.
He fought in the Spanish civil war. During the second world war he was involved with a anti-German paper called De Vonk.
Last was a member of the Social-Democratic Party (SDAP) but later joined the Revoltionary Socialist Party.
He fought in the Spanish civil war. During the second world war he was involved with a anti-German paper called De Vonk.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 23, 2021
De auteur maak het de lezer erg moeilijk met al de spreektaal/dialect en het vele jargon. De enkele voetnoot die hij opneemt volstaat bij lange na niet. En dan nog personages met identieke namen! In hoofdstuk 5 raakte ik definitief de draad kwijt. Jammer, want het leek me een interessant verhalen. Ik wacht op een vertaling in ABN!
November 12, 2025
Travelling by train recently through the Fens of East Anglia - a distinctive landscape of big skies, endless horizons and black earth reclaimed from the sea - I was reminded of this Dutch novel, “Zuiderzee”.
At one level it’s an intriguing, near-contemporaneous account of the draining and reclaiming of the Zuiderzee, an inlet of the Dutch North Sea. This amazing feat of engineering involved the construction of dikes and dams on such an epic scale that it’s often described as one of the 20th century Engineering Seven Wonders of the World.
But there are two other striking things about this novel: the style it’s written in and the fact that it has an unlikely gay story line.
As a record of the transformation of lives and livelihoods brought about by the vast Zuiderzee infrastructure project, the novel sees the world from various perspectives:
- The main character is Theunis Rovers, the son of a fishing family who work out of the harbour on the little island (as it was then) of Urk on the eastern side of the Zuiderzee. Life for Theun is raw and brutal (the novel begins with the drowning of his brother-in-law) but also elemental and exhilarating. He leaves school early as a boy to work on his father’s fishing boat and later he does his military service serving in the navy (p101).
- Auke de Waal, Theun’s closest friend from childhood days to adulthood. They’re together pretty much constantly and Auke saves Theun’s life when he falls from his father’s fishing boat (p54).
- Theun’s father (“Taote” - Frisian for “dad”, I think) is a fisherman who loses his livelihood as a result of the draining of the Zuiderzee but retains his inflexible religious zealotry (playing football with naked knees is “onzedelijkheid” and workers’ cooperatives are “duivelsdingen” p81).
- Arie and Kees, Theun’s brothers who also work on their father’s fishing boat - Kees, good natured and high spirited but soon drinking heavily.
- Theunis’ bitter and repressed older sister, Sietske, who’s widowed at the start of the story when her fisherman husband is drowned in a (biblical style) flood. She goes to work as housekeeper for a comfortably-off bachelor farmer, Wiebren Siebesma, who she soon coerces into a joyless marriage. Everything goes wrong. They have a sickly son and the once happy and prosperous farm fails.
- Boukje Siebesma is Wiebren’s unmarried sister and so becomes sister-in-law to scheming Sietske who oppresses and bullies her. Boukje is simple, sentimental and hardworking. But the men she gives her trust and love to - including Auke - let her down and she drowns herself in the newly constructed sluices.
- The government minister, Cornelis Lely, has spent his entire working life - five decades in engineering and then in government - planning the Zuiderzee works. He sees the project almost messianically as a means of transforming lives as well as the economy: “een groots plan dat duizenden werk beloofde en nieuw land uit het niets schiep” (p143).
- Jan Brolsma, the technical engineer and project director, who recognises the impact that the Zuiderzee works will have on the local communities but single-mindedly presses ahead with the job like “een lokomotief die recht op z’n doel afgaat” (p39).
- Elsa Van Wassenaar, Brolsma’s posh Hague-society fiancée, elegant and sophisticated, who doesn’t like getting her expensive shoes muddy when she has to visit Brolsma at the works. Her Uncle Jacques Duuremans, an Amsterdam financier, shares stock market tips and inside info with Brolsma.
- The curiously named Jelle Minnema, a dreamy, old fashioned Frisian landowner who prefers traditional local poetry and the unchanging Frisian landscape to the uncomfortable complexities of engineering “nieuw land uit de golven” (p106).
- De Rook, a socialist councillor and trades union activist, who wants to turn Theun into a “social warrior” (p124).
The constantly shifting perspective of the novel gives an episodic, filmic feel to the narrative. This is just one aspect of the way in which it was written that was new and experimental at the time. It’s often held up as a novel written in the Expressionist style, although in Dutch art and culture of that period this kind of Modernism was often called “New Objectivity”.
The novel does lots of things that structurally make it very different from a traditional linear story:
- Sometimes it reads like a script for a documentary film: “Haarlem, overstappen” (p90), “Winkels en mensen, gelach, gesprekken” (p104). Characters even think cinematically: “Z’n gedachten tollen, verspringen als de beelden van ‘n film” (p224).
- At other times the language is poetic and metaphoric with haiku-like intensity (for example: “Poes in de turfmand een witte komma” (p12) whose “ogen fosforiserend als de koperen glans van twee gouden knopen” then reappear in the text at least five further times).
- Passages of interior monologue (deepest thoughts) shift abruptly into factual lists of prices and measurements (“3000 m³ keileem per dag en 254.000 m³ klei. 236.000 m³ zand, 44.000 m³ zinkstuk alleen voor de drempels” p132).
- Biblical texts feature extensively, mostly drawn from the wrathful and forbidding Old Testament prophets. The strictly-Protestant folk from Urk and the other Zuiderzee towns rely heavily on biblical quotes in their everyday speech to express their emotions - mostly fear, anger and despair. Judgemental biblical references seep into every aspect of life (“Wraak en zonde, wraak en zonde, tikt de klok op de schoorsteen” p17).
- The character of Cornelis Lely is described using verbatim extracts from Dutch encyclopaedias (p25). We also find things out from newspaper articles, technical reports and a lot of political speeches quoted word for word (which can get a little tedious).
- Time is fluid and blurred rather than linear and definite. Time can stand still as a single moment freezing cinematically (for example, when the boys are playing imaginary games). Then time fast-forwards erratically, so that we suddenly discover that Theun and Auke aren’t little boys anymore - somehow they’ve become 19-year olds.
- Place is also shifting and ambiguous. We’re rarely told explicitly where we are. In one sentence we’re at a financiers’ meeting, in the next we’re in a fishing boat. Then in an express train and then on a flooded construction site.
And then, rather wonderfully, there’s the gay story line - a bit of a surprise in a 1930s novel about a mega infrastructure project. Or perhaps not so surprising. Jef Last (one of those weird Dutch names that feels like an anagram) was himself gay - and also fervently Communist at a time when Western Communists still optimistically believed that Stalin and the Soviet Union loved the LGBT community as part of everyone being equal.
As boys, Theun and Auke are as inseparable as twins, always arm in arm and wrapped together inside the old herring barrel where “zonder te praten kende je iedere gedachte die hij in zijn hoofd droeg”. Later they mend nets together and share everything, from secret plans for the future to the snug bunk in the fishing boat. This was “een vaste vrindschap door jaren en jaren tot aan de dood toe … het mooiste wat er in het leven bestaan kon. Zo eenvoudig en zo mooi … “ (p102).
Then Theun happens upon a controversial new book by the daring early sexologist, Prof August Forel, that delves into the complexities of human sexuality including homosexuality. This leads Theun to review and analyse his own deep relationship with Auke. He realises that it must now be sexual attraction because one of his most exciting and powerful memories is listening to “het duidelijke, hartstochtelijke hijgen van Auke” as his mate has sex with a girl they’ve paid for together (p104).
On the basis of Auke’s energetic performance with the paid-for girl, Theun takes Auke’s heterosexuality for granted. Yet he’s puzzled by Auke’s apparent indifference to Boukje Siebesma, the nice girl he’s engaged to. Theun is so overwhelmed by his desire for Auke - “het verlangen naar Auke” (p124) - that he begins accepting the way he is, rejecting “Sodom en Gomorrha, straf voor de zonde” in favour of more reasoned theology: “Waarom heeft dan een God, die toch goed moet zijn, die vooruit ziet, waarom heeft zo’n God hem, Theunis, dan zoals hij is geschapen?” (p123).
Meanwhile, Theun and Auke - jobless now that fishing has literally dried up in the Zuiderzee - get work together on the construction of the vast embankment that will seal the Zuiderzee from the North Sea. The manual labour is backbreaking and the conditions are shocking. But the camaraderie and physical closeness finally brings them together as sexy, blond-haired Auke seduces Theun into his bunk: “We leven ommers maar een keer, zegt ie goedmoedig, - kom maar in de kooi neef!” (p153).
This proves to be a fleeting moment of joy. Life otherwise overwhelms Theun and Auke, as it does pretty much all of Jef Last’s characters. Theun becomes embittered with politics, and Auke is oppressed by his engagement with Boukje. Their hard labour on the dikes undermines their health and then even this work dries up, leaving them living together in joyless poverty in Amsterdam.
In desperation Theun decides to sell his body for money but he and Auke decide to return home instead. They skate over the frozen, drained Zuiderzee, hand in hand in a final gesture of togetherness, before tragedy overwhelms them in the form of watery deaths. This made me sob unmanfully, I admit.
Meanwhile the new dikes and sluices seem to be failing in a storm of biblical proportions, reflected in the wider world by the economic and political turmoil of the Great Depression. As the government minister grimly points out - or is this Jef Last’s own voice? - it’s all just one endless struggle:
“De drooglegging is een oorlog tegen een machtige vijand … en een oorlog is deze strijd tegen de zee… De zee is een onverbiddelijke vijand die nooit rust, wier kracht onberekenbaar is en die zich, ondanks de knapste ingenieursarbeid steeds opnieuw tracht te wreken als haar macht geknot is.” (p204)
At one level it’s an intriguing, near-contemporaneous account of the draining and reclaiming of the Zuiderzee, an inlet of the Dutch North Sea. This amazing feat of engineering involved the construction of dikes and dams on such an epic scale that it’s often described as one of the 20th century Engineering Seven Wonders of the World.
But there are two other striking things about this novel: the style it’s written in and the fact that it has an unlikely gay story line.
As a record of the transformation of lives and livelihoods brought about by the vast Zuiderzee infrastructure project, the novel sees the world from various perspectives:
- The main character is Theunis Rovers, the son of a fishing family who work out of the harbour on the little island (as it was then) of Urk on the eastern side of the Zuiderzee. Life for Theun is raw and brutal (the novel begins with the drowning of his brother-in-law) but also elemental and exhilarating. He leaves school early as a boy to work on his father’s fishing boat and later he does his military service serving in the navy (p101).
- Auke de Waal, Theun’s closest friend from childhood days to adulthood. They’re together pretty much constantly and Auke saves Theun’s life when he falls from his father’s fishing boat (p54).
- Theun’s father (“Taote” - Frisian for “dad”, I think) is a fisherman who loses his livelihood as a result of the draining of the Zuiderzee but retains his inflexible religious zealotry (playing football with naked knees is “onzedelijkheid” and workers’ cooperatives are “duivelsdingen” p81).
- Arie and Kees, Theun’s brothers who also work on their father’s fishing boat - Kees, good natured and high spirited but soon drinking heavily.
- Theunis’ bitter and repressed older sister, Sietske, who’s widowed at the start of the story when her fisherman husband is drowned in a (biblical style) flood. She goes to work as housekeeper for a comfortably-off bachelor farmer, Wiebren Siebesma, who she soon coerces into a joyless marriage. Everything goes wrong. They have a sickly son and the once happy and prosperous farm fails.
- Boukje Siebesma is Wiebren’s unmarried sister and so becomes sister-in-law to scheming Sietske who oppresses and bullies her. Boukje is simple, sentimental and hardworking. But the men she gives her trust and love to - including Auke - let her down and she drowns herself in the newly constructed sluices.
- The government minister, Cornelis Lely, has spent his entire working life - five decades in engineering and then in government - planning the Zuiderzee works. He sees the project almost messianically as a means of transforming lives as well as the economy: “een groots plan dat duizenden werk beloofde en nieuw land uit het niets schiep” (p143).
- Jan Brolsma, the technical engineer and project director, who recognises the impact that the Zuiderzee works will have on the local communities but single-mindedly presses ahead with the job like “een lokomotief die recht op z’n doel afgaat” (p39).
- Elsa Van Wassenaar, Brolsma’s posh Hague-society fiancée, elegant and sophisticated, who doesn’t like getting her expensive shoes muddy when she has to visit Brolsma at the works. Her Uncle Jacques Duuremans, an Amsterdam financier, shares stock market tips and inside info with Brolsma.
- The curiously named Jelle Minnema, a dreamy, old fashioned Frisian landowner who prefers traditional local poetry and the unchanging Frisian landscape to the uncomfortable complexities of engineering “nieuw land uit de golven” (p106).
- De Rook, a socialist councillor and trades union activist, who wants to turn Theun into a “social warrior” (p124).
The constantly shifting perspective of the novel gives an episodic, filmic feel to the narrative. This is just one aspect of the way in which it was written that was new and experimental at the time. It’s often held up as a novel written in the Expressionist style, although in Dutch art and culture of that period this kind of Modernism was often called “New Objectivity”.
The novel does lots of things that structurally make it very different from a traditional linear story:
- Sometimes it reads like a script for a documentary film: “Haarlem, overstappen” (p90), “Winkels en mensen, gelach, gesprekken” (p104). Characters even think cinematically: “Z’n gedachten tollen, verspringen als de beelden van ‘n film” (p224).
- At other times the language is poetic and metaphoric with haiku-like intensity (for example: “Poes in de turfmand een witte komma” (p12) whose “ogen fosforiserend als de koperen glans van twee gouden knopen” then reappear in the text at least five further times).
- Passages of interior monologue (deepest thoughts) shift abruptly into factual lists of prices and measurements (“3000 m³ keileem per dag en 254.000 m³ klei. 236.000 m³ zand, 44.000 m³ zinkstuk alleen voor de drempels” p132).
- Biblical texts feature extensively, mostly drawn from the wrathful and forbidding Old Testament prophets. The strictly-Protestant folk from Urk and the other Zuiderzee towns rely heavily on biblical quotes in their everyday speech to express their emotions - mostly fear, anger and despair. Judgemental biblical references seep into every aspect of life (“Wraak en zonde, wraak en zonde, tikt de klok op de schoorsteen” p17).
- The character of Cornelis Lely is described using verbatim extracts from Dutch encyclopaedias (p25). We also find things out from newspaper articles, technical reports and a lot of political speeches quoted word for word (which can get a little tedious).
- Time is fluid and blurred rather than linear and definite. Time can stand still as a single moment freezing cinematically (for example, when the boys are playing imaginary games). Then time fast-forwards erratically, so that we suddenly discover that Theun and Auke aren’t little boys anymore - somehow they’ve become 19-year olds.
- Place is also shifting and ambiguous. We’re rarely told explicitly where we are. In one sentence we’re at a financiers’ meeting, in the next we’re in a fishing boat. Then in an express train and then on a flooded construction site.
And then, rather wonderfully, there’s the gay story line - a bit of a surprise in a 1930s novel about a mega infrastructure project. Or perhaps not so surprising. Jef Last (one of those weird Dutch names that feels like an anagram) was himself gay - and also fervently Communist at a time when Western Communists still optimistically believed that Stalin and the Soviet Union loved the LGBT community as part of everyone being equal.
As boys, Theun and Auke are as inseparable as twins, always arm in arm and wrapped together inside the old herring barrel where “zonder te praten kende je iedere gedachte die hij in zijn hoofd droeg”. Later they mend nets together and share everything, from secret plans for the future to the snug bunk in the fishing boat. This was “een vaste vrindschap door jaren en jaren tot aan de dood toe … het mooiste wat er in het leven bestaan kon. Zo eenvoudig en zo mooi … “ (p102).
Then Theun happens upon a controversial new book by the daring early sexologist, Prof August Forel, that delves into the complexities of human sexuality including homosexuality. This leads Theun to review and analyse his own deep relationship with Auke. He realises that it must now be sexual attraction because one of his most exciting and powerful memories is listening to “het duidelijke, hartstochtelijke hijgen van Auke” as his mate has sex with a girl they’ve paid for together (p104).
On the basis of Auke’s energetic performance with the paid-for girl, Theun takes Auke’s heterosexuality for granted. Yet he’s puzzled by Auke’s apparent indifference to Boukje Siebesma, the nice girl he’s engaged to. Theun is so overwhelmed by his desire for Auke - “het verlangen naar Auke” (p124) - that he begins accepting the way he is, rejecting “Sodom en Gomorrha, straf voor de zonde” in favour of more reasoned theology: “Waarom heeft dan een God, die toch goed moet zijn, die vooruit ziet, waarom heeft zo’n God hem, Theunis, dan zoals hij is geschapen?” (p123).
Meanwhile, Theun and Auke - jobless now that fishing has literally dried up in the Zuiderzee - get work together on the construction of the vast embankment that will seal the Zuiderzee from the North Sea. The manual labour is backbreaking and the conditions are shocking. But the camaraderie and physical closeness finally brings them together as sexy, blond-haired Auke seduces Theun into his bunk: “We leven ommers maar een keer, zegt ie goedmoedig, - kom maar in de kooi neef!” (p153).
This proves to be a fleeting moment of joy. Life otherwise overwhelms Theun and Auke, as it does pretty much all of Jef Last’s characters. Theun becomes embittered with politics, and Auke is oppressed by his engagement with Boukje. Their hard labour on the dikes undermines their health and then even this work dries up, leaving them living together in joyless poverty in Amsterdam.
In desperation Theun decides to sell his body for money but he and Auke decide to return home instead. They skate over the frozen, drained Zuiderzee, hand in hand in a final gesture of togetherness, before tragedy overwhelms them in the form of watery deaths. This made me sob unmanfully, I admit.
Meanwhile the new dikes and sluices seem to be failing in a storm of biblical proportions, reflected in the wider world by the economic and political turmoil of the Great Depression. As the government minister grimly points out - or is this Jef Last’s own voice? - it’s all just one endless struggle:
“De drooglegging is een oorlog tegen een machtige vijand … en een oorlog is deze strijd tegen de zee… De zee is een onverbiddelijke vijand die nooit rust, wier kracht onberekenbaar is en die zich, ondanks de knapste ingenieursarbeid steeds opnieuw tracht te wreken als haar macht geknot is.” (p204)
March 21, 2021
Onterecht vergeten documentaire roman van Jef Last over de proletarisering van vissers tijdens de drooglegging van de Zuiderzee. Uitgebreide bespreking volgt later deze week in de nieuwsbrief van Links Richten!
July 16, 2022
Nadat ik gelezen had over dit boek. Vermoedde ik dat het zou gaan om een coming-of-age ontwikkelingsroman met op de achtergrond de inpoldering van de Zuiderzee met een homoseksuele achtergrond. De personen in het boek zijn te operrvlakkig, wat het moeilijk maakt om de verschillende personages te onthouden als het boek springt van personage naar personage. De delicten in het boek waren wel goed leesbaar.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews