Career
During the German occupation, Schierbeek was part of the resistance movement. Directly after the war (in 1945), he published his first, still conventional novel that dealt with exactly these experiences (translated, this novel reads as Terror against terror). Then, he wrote the first experimental novel in the Dutch language, which was published in 1951.
Its title reads as The book I, and apparently does not have any narrative structure.
lieutenant seems to consist of poetic associations of "loose" words and thoughts. lieutenant is the first in a trilogy.
The other volumes are De anderen namen (The Other Names) and De derde persoon (The Third Person). Bert Schierbeek was also part of COBRA, an internationalist artistical movement that intended to renew and modernise the postwar visual arts and poetry (with members like Karel Appel, Hugo Claus, Corneille and Lucebert).
His "composition novels", composed of fragments, culminated in the multilingual and multimodal (including illustrations and experimental typography) Een grote dorst (A Great Thirst, 1968).
