Summary
Jeroen Brouwers: Client E. Busken
Great. Angry, witty, intelligent and confused. Wonderfully. — Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
Jeroen Brouwers reached his new literary peak in the novel Client E. Busken. The main hero of the novel is the language with which Brouwers sharply illuminates every detail of his downfall. It is language that creates us and makes us what we are: language, only Language. In this sense, however misanthropic it may be, this novel is also an inimitable ode to humanity. — De Standaard
In his endlessly confused but often witty train of thought, client E. Busken hovers between the present and the past and describes a day in his home life in fragmented memories of true and fictional events. His eloquence is a testimony to his erudition! Client E. Busken meets a new young nurse who ignites the remnants of his erotic imagination, faces sanitary accidents and boring old men. At the end of the day, there is a barbecue and a thirst for a cigarette, but the client E. Busken is furious because patients no longer exist in the Dutch health system (but "clients"), he is furious with his long-dead mother, he is furious with the staff of the nursing home to which he was brought against his will, he is furious with the other residents and the whole world. Busken pretends to be deaf and dumb so he can ignore the staff who treat him like a child and deprive him of all privacy. What he was in life, the reader does not learn: the client is an unknown, unreliable omniscient narrator who is imprisoned in a nursing home, because of his forgetfulness, or because of some unrest, or because of a rebellion against the world. Nothing special happens in the novel or in life, except that an angry rebellious old man awaits his own death.
Client E. Busken by Jeroen Brouwers is an unusually humorous and cruel novel about the decline of a demented man who spends his last days confined to a wheelchair in a nursing home. His outburst towards the paramedics is also his testament.
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