Writing
His early work was strongly influenced by modernism, but he soon decided that this was not his strength. The titles of his stories and poems better represented his talent for critical reflection towards reality and a certain detachment from everyday life. Like his friend, the author Menno ter Braak, he was a great admirer of the famous writer Multatuli. But much more than Ter Braak, du Perron was in fact his cultural heir.
Du Perrons masterpiece Land of Origin (1935) is strongly influenced by Multatuli and Malraux, but rather it is a work that stands alone in Dutch literature as a true autobiographical novel. Extracts from the Dutch East Indies of his childhood are interspersed with European episodes, mostly located in Paris, where du Perron paints a sharp portrait of Europe, based on interviews with his contemporary intellectuals and artists.
The freshness of du Perrons observations and the liveliness of his imagination makes ‘Land of origin’ among the best Dutch novels of the twentieth century.
Read more about this topic: Edgar Du Perron
Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“...I don’t have an inner drive to do as well as anybody else ... I have a great pleasure in writing and part of that is political and part of that is I’m surprised that I’ve done as well as I have. I really am just surprised.”
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“What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist’s presence makes itself felt above that of the model.... With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul’s style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.”
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