A View of the Ocean

The legacy of Dutch novelist and playwright de Hartog (1914–2002) is fittingly capped with this remarkable account of his mother's life and death. His mother was devoted to his clergyman father until he died in 1938, when she “came into her own.” Although war threatened, she booked passage to the Dutch East Indies to spend time with her oldest son. De Hartog himself only barely survived the war; any faith he'd had was shattered by the senselessness of the deaths he'd seen. Yet his mother returned from a Japanese prisoner of war camp with her spirit and love for her family intact. She lived a quietly religious life in postwar Amsterdam until cancer brought her to the hospital, where her sons attempted to comfort her through the agonies of dying. After her death, de Hartog heard a quotation from Quaker movement founder George Fox, about “an infinite ocean of light and love” flowing “over the ocean of darkness.” This vision, he realized, was his parents' legacy to him, just as this powerful, luminous elegy is de Hartog's last gift to his many readers worldwide. (Nov.)