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by Jan De Hartog
She was a quiet, unassuming woman married to a giant of a man, a famous Protestant theologian and pastor, simple, bighearted and big-muscled, who moved through life with gusto and the commotion of a wagon train and who, but for God, might have become a pirate or a general. He adored his wife and didn’t like anyone else around to claim her attention. Their sons saw him as a monster of egocentricity, a tyrant, a blustering bully; to her he was a sensitive, shy, helpless man with a mission. She believed in him from the moment they met, and under the wings of her faith in him as a philosopher, he became one.
During their thirty years of marriage this woman’s only concern was to enable her husband to hearken to “the voice of God.”
After his death she discovered somewhere deep inside a core of drop-forged steel. She rose to the challenge of widowhood and, continuing his work, took his place in the world. The full splendor of this tiny, frail woman’s character, intelligence, and courage became evident during her World War II internment in a Japanese camp in the Dutch East Indies, when she managed to arrange a cease-fire between the Dutch Army and Indonesian guerillas.
After her release from prison camp, she returned to Amsterdam, and resumed her simple life, offering spiritual advice to those seeking solace. Finally, she was faced with the ultimate test of her spirit: a diagnosis of a cancer too far advanced for treatment.
De Hartog tells us how his mother’s blazing courage through it all inspired his own spiritual awakening as he found, in her final months, the strength, the power, and the acceptance to see her through to the end.
"[T]his powerful, luminous elegy is de Hartog's last gift to his many readers worldwide. " - Publishers Weekly.
"The book is remarkable not just for its exceptional subject, but also for its portrait of the unsettling process by which an adult child comes at last to know a parent. A diminutive masterpiece." - Kirkus Reviews.
This information about A View of the Ocean was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jan De Hartog is a Dutch novelist and playwright, who died in 2002 at the age of 88. His novel Holland's Glory inspired the national spirit of Netherlanders during the early years of the German occupation in the Second World War.
Published in Dutch 10 days before the outbreak of war, it was an account of sailors in ocean-going tugs, which not only sold one million copies but reinforced the Netherlanders' sense of identity. It was read no less avidly by Germans for its insights on the Dutch character.
He escaped from Germany, and eventually settled in the US where he became a successful playwright and author. His play, The Fourposter, won the Tony Award for Best Play. His twenty-one novels, published over a fifty-two year period, include The Captain, The Commodore, and a trilogy fictionalizing the Society of Friends: The Peaceable Kingdom, The Peculiar People, and The Outer Buoy.
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