Ferdinand Bordewijk

Biography

Ferdinand Bordewijk (10 October 1884 – 28 April 1965) was a Dutch author and lawyer. His style, which is terse and symbolic, is considered to belong to New Objectivity and magic realism. Character (1997), an Academy Award-winning film directed by Mike van Diem, was based on his novel Karakter (1938). His breakthrough came with the short novels Blokken (Blocks, 1931), Knorrende Beesten (Growling Animals, 1933) and Bint (1934), and two longer works: Rood paleis (Red Palace, 1936) and Karakter. Blokken was a dystopian work, received as a criticism of communism. It is comparable to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which appeared one year later and which Bordewijk deemed to be junk ("een enorme prul"). He studied law at Leiden University. After graduation he worked first at a Rotterdam law firm and became an independent lawyer in Schiedam in 1919. He was married to the composer Johanna Bordewijk-Roepman, and wrote the libretto for her opera Rotonde (1941).