Sunken Red

A distinguished Dutch writer is introduced to an American audience with this cryptic, haunting novel, first published in 1981. The narrator's recollection of his internment in a Japanese concentration camp as a five-year-old closely attached to his mother alternates with the cynical telling of his later life in Holland. He is middle-aged, engaged in spiritless affairs although he is a husband and father, when he receives the news of his mother's death in a nursing home. Long estranged from her, he is able to salute his mother's courageous spirit as he could not do when she lived, and thereby earns a measure of release from crippling anomie. With its Camus-like autobiographical overtones, Brouwers's exploration of the experience of loss through estrangement and death lingers with the reader. (Feb.)