Like his contemporary Tip Marugg, Boeli van Leeuwen belongs to the white, Protestant, largely Dutch-educated planter class on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, whose conflicting loyalties, guilt and decline he chronicles memorably.


Shields of Clay, his fifth novel, derives its title from the book of Job (Chapter13:12), which stresses man’s helplessness in the face of disaster and disintegration. Jean-Claude Devereau, last in a long line of once-wealthy colonists, is also the main narrator — his unhappy Dutch wife Marjolein contributes one chapter and we are given the minutes of a meeting at which Devereau is sent on a mission to investigate the neighbouring island of Santa Maria, which has reportedly fallen under Marxist influence. Estranged from his surroundings, Devereau seeks release by fleeing regularly from the dark ancestral mansion to the simplicity of a weekend beach cottage. His mission ends disastrously when his ship is blown up in the harbour of Santa Maria.


Van Leeuwen’s style is spare and evocative, with multicultural references, and there is a powerful undercurrent of both Spanish and the Antilles creole language, Papiamento, which further strengthens the impact of a writer who has rightly been called ‘truly a South American novelist writing in Dutch’.

Al fin y al cabo, my wife and I have what I call a good marriage.

We slither past one another like soapy dolphins.

My loathing for her wilted body has slowly changed into passive pity. We take care to avoid each other’s breath. We keep our bodies covered and go about our bodily functions behind locked doors. In the evenings, I sit beneath my chandelier. My wife sleeps, dumpf und schwer, in the big mahogany bed , stripped of both mask and armor. And the prayer of Tula to the Divine Majesty and the Purest Spirit remained unanswered, because it was decided by the Christian government of this island ‘that the chief of the rebellious negroes, nicknamed Rigeau, without due process of law shall be brought to the place of execution, there be tied to a cross, the lower body be broken alive, the face to be blackened with fire, and then the head to be severed from the body¼’

God is love and this is why each morning I am driven out by images that cannot possibly be coped with and digested in this house.

Flores para los muertos. (p. 31-32, tr. Richard Huijing)