Ferdinand Bordewijk

His style, which is terse and symbolic, is considered to belong to New Objectivity and magic realism.

After graduation, he worked first at a Rotterdam law firm and became an independent lawyer in Schiedam in 1919, remaining an inhabitant of The Hague all of his life.

[2] His first published work was a volume of poetry titled Paddestoelen ("Mushrooms") under the pseudonym Ton Ven.

His breakthrough came with the short novels Blokken ("Blocks", 1931), Knorrende Beesten ("Growling Animals", 1933) and Bint (1934), later frequently published together as a set of three, followed by the longer works Rood paleis ("Red Palace", 1936) and Karakter (1938, translated into English as Character in 1966).

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").