Books: If you want to know the truth about the Occupation, ask a novelist

The Word London literary festival, in full swing this week, is bringing over a number of celebrated writers from the Netherlands who represent something of a literary boom at home. Dutch Book Week this year featured a free book for all book-buyers by Connie Palmen, one of the authors in London this week. Palmen, who combines both the playful and philosophical in her work, published her first novel, The Laws, four years ago. A feminist slant on the Faust story, it sold over 300,000 copies. The protagonist's quest for wisdom leads her to sell her soul to seven men, including an astrologer, a priest and a psychiatrist.

In the lowlands, just as in France, it has taken a generation for a realistic account of the Occupation to emerge. The official version is that all Netherlanders were partisans, and that the family who sheltered Anne Frank were entirely typical of the local community's protective attitude to the Jews. That 100,000 Jews were smartly surrendered to their fate by the Amsterdam authorities, and that those who survived to reclaim their homes after the War were shamefully treated, is given short historical shrift. Marcel Moring's mother was Jewish, and, as he points out: "Had we lived a couple of kilometres further east, across the German border, I wouldn't be here." Moring, whose novels obsessively revolve around memory's lapses and absences, writes feelingly about this problematic legacy.

Adriaan van Dis's My Father's War, a part-fictionalised autobiography that sold over 460,000 copies, details his father's time spent in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, and his own early experiences - conceived in Indonesia, carried on a ship, and raised in Holland. It's written with a beguiling mixture of charm, anguish and humour.

Alongside the reality of the Occupation, the war in the Pacific, and particularly in the ex-colonies of the formerly "Dutch" East Indies, is another prime consignment to oblivion. By reviving its memories so vividly, Van Dis believes he has at last made contact with his own heritage. "All the old colonial families were touched by the tar brush. We simply said that there was Italian blood among our ancestors." Quite how so many Italians got in where so many Indonesians apparently failed was never fully explained.

Abdelkader Benali was born in 1973, just young enough to be son of Van Dis or Marcel Moring, and the grandson of the grand old men of letters, Harry Mulisch and Hugo Claus. Benali is among the first generation of the growing Moroccan community to be born in the Netherlands. Yet he is also part of the generation torn between a "home" country where the family still resides; a "host" country that can be inhospitable and flattering by turns; and a "place of return" where you dream of going to die. The son of a Halal butcher, the eldest of 10 siblings, speaking three Moroccan languages before learning any European ones, Benali is a runaway success. He writes only in Dutch and is translated into seven languages, none of which is Arabic. His Wedding by the Sea is a wholly Moroccan fairytale. Benali is an original magical realist, alternating traditional and contemporary imagery, to both astute and tender effect.

The Dutch and Flemish authors visiting The Word this week span more than two generations and come from a variety of countries of origin. There are events focusing on children's writers (Anne Provoost and Bart Moyaert), literary celebrations (Luc Coorevits' Green-Eyed Monster, an evening of theatre, film and live music on the theme of jealousy), along with a Gala Evening of Poetry involving poets of other nationalities. That this sold out so fast speaks volumes about audience sophistication and the philistinism of publishers here who reject even their own long- established poetry lists.

For details of events featuring these authors, see listings on page 11