J. M. A. Biesheuvel

J. M. A. Biesheuvel

The first people that come to my mind when I hear the word ‘hero’ are animated characters that I remember from my childhood, for example: Superman, Batman and the Power rangers.

Naturally I thought of these super-heroes first when I was asked to write an assignment on heroes. Now I could start writing a paper on Superman, but since I’m not exactly the most brilliant writer, let alone in English, I decided not to take that chance.

The second type of people I started thinking about were (arguably existing) universal heroes or saints that helped build our society to where we are now. Think of: Elizabeth Blackwell, William of Orange, Hugo de Groot, Jesus, Galilei, Gandhi, God, Krishna, an incredible amount of brave soldiers that fought and/or died in the war and so on. But, although these people did great things for the world and should be given credit for that, these are heroes of the world and not my personal heroes.

My personal hero is a bipolar man who goes by the name J.M.A. Biesheuvel and who lives a normal life with his inspiring (to him) wife Eva.

To be quite honest, this is the only thing I know about my hero. So I could bore you and myself for that matter, by reading his entire biography and writing the Wikipedia page about Biesheuvel down in my own words. But the facts that he studied in Leiden or followed lectures by Karel van het Reve are not features why I chose him as my hero.

The following thing that does make him my hero is the fact that he writes incredible short and long stories. Stories that are written amazingly and easily readable. Stories of a few pages that let me feel more emotions by reading the first sentence than hearing any of the heroic names above. Stories that have no purpose but that are still the extreme opposite of boring. Like the story about himself wanting to write a story about a man who commits suicide. The man wanders around in the universe since God won’t let him go to heaven because he doesn’t want to take part in any of God’s nonsense. At the end of the story, Biesheuvel decides he cannot write a story about a man committing suicide because he doesn’t know the first thing about committing suicide.

Stories that inspired me to read Toergenjev and Dostojewski; two amazing Russian writers.

And last but not least, Biesheuvel wrote by far the best story I’ve read in my almost 20-years of existence: ‘Kreet uit een kelderwoning’ (English translation: ‘Cry from a basement’). This is a story I’ve already read twice but wouldn’t mind reading again. This story makes me want to throw away 3/4 of the books in my bookshelf because most 200 page novels are incomparable to this 30 page story. This is a story I would recommend to anyone, but I could only hope that others will get the same pleasure out of reading it as I did.















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