Adriaan van der Veen (1916–2003)

years of crisis and poverty known as the Great Depression. No Dutch literature from that period is canonized, in a way comparable to The Grapes of Wrath. These stories therefore offer a unique perspective on this period.

The first story describes the life in poverty, a lack of money urging the family to move. In the second story, in spite of injustice of being forced to do extra work after office hours (cleaning the floor), poverty teaches the main character of the story humility. The stories have a discernable influence of the social justice movements of the period, such as communism, and brewing political tension in the background. This becomes evident in the third story, with its references to the revolutionary civil war in Spain.

Within the context of Dutch literature, the stories would form interesting reading.… (meer)

Adriaan van der Veen was a Dutch writer and journalist. During the Second World War, he worked in the United States as a correspondent for a Dutch newspaper. Although Jacht in de diepte was not his literary debut (which was Geld speelt de grote rol, published in 1938), Jacht in de diepte contains some short stories that were written before the publication of his debut.

Jacht in de diepte consists of 11 short stories written between 1935 and 1946. One of the stories, "De man op de toren" (1942) was written in New York. The style of the short stories can best be described as expressionism, however, quite different from the novels and short stories of Simon Vestdijk. However, similar to Vestdijk's Meneer Visser's hellevaart Van Der Veen's stories have a quality, as if they are dreams.

Each of the eleven stories is very short. There are few comparable prose works to this type of work in Dutch literature.… (meer)