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Overview
Boeli Cornelis Jacobus van Leeuwen was a Curacao-born Dutch-Antillean poet and writer, who was born on October 10th 1922 in Otrobanda, Willemstad and died November 28th, 2007 in Willemstad. He is acclaimed as one of the great authors of the Dutch Antilles, alongside Wim Rutgers, Cola Debrot, and Henry Coomans. Sometimes called “the Gabriel Garcia Marquez of the Antilles,” his lyrical and symphonic prose draws unrelated romanticist themes, such as beauty and death, and ties them to his belief in a universal Christianity and the values entailed. Van Leeuwen was a Vijverberg and Cola Debrot award-winner, and his most notable publications include The Rock of Stumbling, A Stranger on Earth, and The Sign of Jonah, along with his article collection Genial Anarchy.

Early Life
Boeli van Leeuwen was born in 1922 at the Casa Blanca mansion in Willemstad, Curacao. He was the second of three children to Pieter Henrik Van Leeuwen, Aruban civil servant, and Ana Maria Gorsira, the white protestant Curacao-born daughter of a plantation owner. van Leeuwen was born on his father’s work travel to the Casa Blanca mansion, a surprise birth given his family was based out of Aruba at the time. Pieter Henrik would leave Aruba to appease his extended family, and become the district master in Curacao from 1923 to 1939, governor of Bonaire from 1939 though 1943, and governor of St. Martin of the Windward Islands from 1943 to 1948. While growing up in Curacao, van Leeuwen attended the Hendrik School in the Punda district from 1928 to 1936, experiencing firsthand the economic and racialized tension of island life. In 1936, van Leeuwen left with his mother to The Hague, Netherlands to receive a more advanced high school education. Van Leeuwen attended the Hollyhock Square Lyceum in The Hague from 1936-43, and stayed in Europe through World War II. Shortly after the war, he spent a year in Berlin.

First Return to Curacao, Travel and Beginnings of Career
Van Leeuwen returned to Curacao in 1946, and courted Cola Dobrot’s niece, Dorothy Dobrot, before marrying her in 1947. The couple honeymooned to Klein Santa Martha in Curacao, during which Van Leeuwen began his writing career, sending articles on Rembrandt (a major inspiration) to be published in the August 1947 issue of Curacao’s News Reports and Stock Exchange. Shortly after, Van Leeuwen wrote Temples in Deserts, the first and only poetry of his career, and his first novel, The Son. In September 1947, Van Leeuwen moved back to the Netherlands with Dorothy Dobrot, where his first child and son, Pieter, was then born in October 1947. Boeli van Leeuwen began his pre-law studies, and obtained his pre-law bachelor’s degree in 1949 from the University of Amsterdam, and his doctoral law degree in 1950 at University of Leiden. Van Leeuwen then took the time to move his family to Barcelona to study the Spanish political system. After a year in Barcelona, Van Leeuwen moved to Caracas, Venezuela in 1951, where his second child, Carla, was born. His career as legal study boomed and collapsed with the rise and fall of the pre-Chavez government, and van Leeuwen went on to move back to Curacao in 1957, where he would remain for the rest of his life.

Second Return to Curacao
After the catastrophe in Venezuela, Boeli van Leeuwen succeeded in getting job as an accountant and legal affairs consultant with the Curacao government in 1959. His final child, Ana Maria, is also born in this year. Throughout the chaos of his rapidly shifting life, Van Leeuwen wrote his second novel, The Rock of Stumbling, in 1959. The Rock of Stumbling would be his breakout novel with a progressive viewpoint on racial hierarchy, sexuality, and sin. Upon completing the quintessential novel, van Leeuwen dishearteningly received the news that nearly all publishers and bookstores in the Dutch Antilles were unwilling to carry it due to perceived “obscene” language and subject matter. Yet luckily, Abram Salas, a bookstore owner and small-time publisher, sold and published The Rock of Stumbling, reinforcing his status as a hero for Antillean writers.

Awards and Late Life
In 1961, van Leeuwen won the annual Vijverberg Prize, for the best Dutch-language book, for The Rock of Stumbling. Van Leeuwen’s acclaim then inspired him to write his third major novel, A Stranger on Earth, in 1962. Also, in 1962, Van Leeuwen’s third and final child Elisabeth Clemence was born in Curacao. Van Leeuwen then took a hiatus to work and raise his family, and returned in 1966 with the novel Son of Adam. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, van Leeuwen took another hiatus from writing to assist the government in keeping Aruba and Curacao attached to Dutch Antilles. His work culminated in a success that lead to his appointment as secretary of Willemstad, Curacao in 1976. In 1978, van Leeuwen wrote A Father, A Son, his fourth novel. In 1982, van Leeuwen retired from his government office, and began working instead as a pro-bono lawyer in Curacao to drug addicts, the mentally ill, and alcoholics. In 1983, van Leeuwen won the Cola Debrot Lifetime Achievement Award for his literary legacy and humanitarian work in Curacao. van Leeuwen would go on to write and publish 3 final works from 1983 to 1990, including the novel Shields Loam in 1985, the novel Sign of Jonah in 1988, and the article collection Genial Anarchy in 1990. In 2007, after roughly 10 years of complete retirement, Boeli van Leeuwen received a lifetime achievement award from the Dutch Foundation for Literature on his birthday, October 22nd. van Leeuwen died one month later, in the Taam Clinic of Willemstad on November 28th, 2007.

Works
1947: Temples and Deserts

1947: The Son

1959: The Rock of Stumbling

Synopsis:

Eddie Lejeune, the eighth son of a plantation holder in Curacao and de-facto protagonist of the novel, is only 15 when his father dies of alcoholism and leaves him an outsider both in his family and society. While grieving, he becomes enamored with a girl of a lower social class in his school, to the chagrin and chastisement of his family members. They decide to ship him to the Netherlands, where he loses himself in vices of money and women before being drafted in WWII. He sees the horrors of war, and ends up in a POW camp where he crafts images of the world on fire. His conflictual experiences result in a loss of innocence so profound that he questions how can he return home. What is home? Though his worldly travels and quest for belonging, Lejeune returns to the island with the perspective of nomad rather than elite, and finds home where he least expects it: internally.

Awards:

Vijverberg Award, 1961

1962: A Stranger on Earth

Synopsis: Kai, the protagonist of A Stranger on Earth, grows up in Curacao during the height of a corrupt and violent dictator pre-WWII. As his locations fluctuate with the stability of his family and parents’ marriage, Kai floats between The Netherlands and Curacao, detailing the reader with his mixed heritage and early life before falling in love with a married Spanish Catholic woman after the war. His affair leads him from the paradise of new love, to the fall of her husband’s discovery of the deceit, and back to Curacao upon with which he looks with fresh eyes upon his old home.

Review: “In a style that is a montage by turns vernacular and lyrical, comical and terrifying, visionary and naturalistic, van Leeuwen weaves his stories with metaphysics and theology…Van Leeuwen is an intellectually challenging author, who knows his theology, but he also has the common touch, a twinkling wit, serious hope, and a deep sense of compassionate sorrow for humanity’s condition.”

1966: The First Adam

1978: A Father, A Son

1985: Shields Loam

1988: The Sign of Jonah

Kirkus Review

Review: “The fifth novel but first US publication for noted Dutch Caribbean novelist [Boeli] van Leeuwen--a modernist fable of faith and affirmation in a vividly rendered setting. Seamlessly mixing metafiction, magical realism, and literary allusion, van Leeuwen describes the moral and metaphysical challenges that his aging narrator faces as he seeks some assurances of immortality… A deceptively small book packed with big thoughts and big questions, all for the most part refreshingly accessible. An interesting debut.”

1990: Genial Anarchy

Writing Style and Themes
Van Leeuwen is often called the “Antillean Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” thanks to his use of the intersectional narrative forms of magical realism to build structurally complex and distinct tales. Van Leeuwen’s thus combines the ancient and religious themes of his desires with the modern and quasi-confessional nature of his prose and settings in his writing.

In terms of literary content, there are several themes that permeate the highly stylized works of Boeli van Leeuwen. van Leeuwen finds, much like the American Romanticist movement, inherent value in the man-god relationship to establish the thematic subtext for the story he wishes to tell. For example, in A Stranger on Earth, he opens with a portion of Psalm 119 that foreshadows the plot: “I am a stranger on Earth, hide not Thy commandments from me!” Van Leeuwen’s use of religious rhetoric helps establish the permeating tone of isolation throughout the book, in which the adolescent son of an underachieving businessman finds his mother in bed with another man, setting off the destruction of his reality. The religious vernacular he echoes in the contemporary world creates a tension between the sinful nature of humankind and a worldlier morality. In an interview, he declares that "Christianity is a real religion. They start with the fact of the failure of man. You only need to look around to see that today... Basically, you cannot do anything about the human condition. The astronauts went to the moon, carrying the original sin as it were with them.”

Boeli van Leeuwen’s work is often haunted by the theme of death. All of the protagonists of Boeli van Leeuwen’s stories share the same existential vision of mortality: they see death as the deepest and most terrifying universal truth. Van Leeuwen once commented, " Young men are an example of perceived immortality. They do not believe in death; they cannot imagine it… But at some point, the germ of death enters you and then you realize what Augustine says you are in death. Facing death is an enormous absurdity. All you do is totally absurd, unless there is eternal life, but the line is really solid.”

Finally, one of the more controversial themes of van Leeuwen’s work is his somewhat negative portrayal of women. His female characters have often been the bearers of sin, a la Eve of Biblical history, to which he has responded, “I've also always had a strong sense of guilt towards my father. I always tend to see men as victims of women. That's a strong Caribbean patroon. In Europe, it seems the women in our region to be exploited. But women have a very strong position here... The woman is in her nest, the children run around her son to remain attached to the mother of all complexes and problems entailed. That machismo what you have here is actually a proof of impotence.” This implicit misogyny in van Leeuwen’s work has only recently been put under literary scrutiny.