Xaviera, "The Happy Hooker" and "Dear Madame" Penthouse columnist and with 17 other books to her credit, republishes her father’s 1940 novel, Angel of Death.
Xaviera, while sorting through her library in preparation of her decision to embrace her own inevitable death, made a shocking discovery. Among hundreds and maybe thousands of books, she discovered a novel written by her father, MICK DE VRIES.
Mick de Vries (1902 - 1973) was a physician, artist, writer and life-long friend of Simon Vestdijk, the Dutch author was nominated 15 times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He and Mick attended medical school in Amsterdam, and both were frequent visitors to the Dutch East Indies. It was Vestdijk who inspired Mick to add writing to his artistic talents, resulting in the publication of ANGEL OF DEATH in 1940. De Vries and Vestdijk maintained a lively correspondence until Vestdijk’s death in 1971: Mick's letters have been preserved and published under the title Knetterend Vuurwerk.
ANGEL OF DEATH is largely set in the Dutch East Indies, where de Vries paints a sharp picture of a colonial society. The main character is a woman who, as a nurse, is able to commit misdeeds without anyone noticing. Fate and the fascination with death play an important role. It is a haunting book emphasizing gloom, violence, loneliness, ugliness, disease, and other dark sides of human existence. The many striking scenes from the darkest period in world history justify the reissue of this chilling novel!
Unknown to de Vries at the time, his descriptions of pre-war tales of polio paralysis, mercy killings, interrogations by incompetent inquisitors, and incarceration under inhumane filthy conditions were a macabre foreshadowing of what was to befall him and his family only four years later.
After my father married my French/German mother, Germaine Schluetter, they settled in the Dutch East Indies, where Mick had been living on and off for the last 20 years and had become the director of the hospital in Surabaya.
Xaviera was born in 1943 during the Japanese occupation. The family was quickly interned in camps, cruelly tortured, and all three barely escaping death.
The Japanese assigned Mick as a physician for the women’s camps. Unfortunately, this didn’t prevent him being tortured nearly to death by the camp officials for providing extra medical treatment for his patients. Xaviera’s mother was also beaten and left for dead for days in an enclosure of rotting corpses by the infamous Japanese beastly commander SONEI in the concentration camp TJIDENG. Her crime was attempting to purchase medicine on the black market for Xaviera who, like many other kids, had a very high fever and dysentery.
After surviving the war, Mick and his family returned to the Netherlands. In 1973, Dr. Mick de Vries died of heart failure after becoming partially paralyzed from suffering one stroke after another for seven years. So, here the man who discussed Kafka and Dostojevsky with Vestdijk was now doomed to watch Lucille Ball and Charly Chaplin movies on TV.
One asks, could Xaviera’s recent discovery of her father’s novel extolling merciful deaths and exposing the macabre side of human nature be her father’s gift from beyond? Is it his way of supporting and validating her decision to embrace euthanasia as a possible life alternative? One of Xaviera's life-long psychological issues is her desire to die. She is the spokeswoman for a major organization that gives advice about this subject in the Benelux, often speaking about self-inflicted EUTHENASIA and DEATH.
