I’m ambitious and vain,” Hans Maarten van den Brink says tongue-in-cheek. The 68 year-old Dutchman reconsiders the source of his success. “What drives people? I used to always want to win. That’s why I liked rowing, although I didn’t win most of the time. I can tell you, I used to be very competitive but that’s completely gone now.”

Photo H.M. van den Brink

Credit Laura van den Brink

Bundles of money, big cars and the Gulf War. Three surprising side-tracks that cropped up in conversation with this gifted storyteller. The eldest son of three, Hans Maarten was born in Oegstgeest, South Holland, in the western Netherlands to a German mother and Dutch father. He briefly studied Literature at Leiden University before starting out as a journalist. Five years after the 1993 publication of his debut novel (De vooruitgang), Hans Maarten made his name with his second book, On the Water.

On the Water is a beautifully written coming-of-age story about two young oarsmen on different sides of the social divide. The protagonist, Anton, is a shy outsider, who finds independence from his claustrophobic family home through a love of the river and his unexpected entry into the rowing club. There, Anton meets David, a self-confident oarsman, and the novice pair are trained by a mysterious German coach.

The story is set during the golden summer of pre-war Amsterdam and the two young rowers forge an intense relationship as they throw themselves into the physical labour of rowing, while the grim developments on the world stage remain at a distance. By the end, on the wintry eve of Holland’s liberation, Anton lies beside his beloved river mourning a lost world: David has disappeared and the boathouse is derelict and deserted.

On the Water received many award nominations and rave reviews. Now in its 23^rd edition, the novel has been translated into 14 languages. Did Hans Maarten expect such success? “Absolutely not.”

In the US the book is sometimes characterised as gay literature. “My son is called Pieter and that’s who the book is dedicated to. They suppose it is the name of my boyfriend,” he laughs. Nevertheless the nature of Anton’s and David’s relationship isn’t explicitly defined. “Do they love each other? I don’t know. Interpretations are free,” says Hans Maarten.

Hans Maarten wrote only during the summer holidays; at the time he was the Editor in Chief of television at Dutch broadcaster VPRO. It was a struggle but things clicked after becoming a father.

“I was so happy that I just wrote the rest of the book,” says Hans Maarten. “It was like a barrier had broken. After I became a father I had the self-confidence to write what I wanted to write. Instead of questioning whether it was good enough. The years before I was always getting stuck, writing a page and then thinking: it just doesn’t work.

“I was overcome with self doubt and then something unplugged. I still didn’t think it was good but it was the thing I wanted to write and the thing I wanted to get across. I sent it to my editor. She started reading it late in the evening and called me at 11:30pm, ‘I have to go to bed but we’re going to publish it’. That it became successful, in terms of sales, was astonishing. I don’t know why, but people love it.”

Heartfelt messages from readers flooded in. “A woman I knew said, ‘My father rowed at the 1936 Olympics. When he started to get dementia in his eighties, he wanted to move to the other side of the country where his former pair’s partner lived. Now I understand why’.” An older Jewish rower told Hans Maarten, “You’ve written the story of my life,” to which a baffled Hans Maarten replied: “I don’t know anything about your life”. “No but this is it.”

Hans Maarten’s motivations were pleasingly innocent. “It was more than a spark,” he says – when asked what inspired him. “It was my feelings of happiness when I was an oarsman. The rowing. The few times when everything clicks and you get in the flow. I’d been so happy with that; I thought well I have to do something with it.”

As a veteran rower Hans Maarten rowed for De Hoop, which more or less served as a model for the fictional rowing club in the story (“it used to be very elitist”), but he spent his competitive years at Die Leythe in Leiden. He was coached by Jan Klerks, who later coached at the highest levels. “I was part of a small group of talented rowers. Several went on to win gold medals at the Olympics. Not me. I did the work and it made me happy, but I did not achieve international success. Just wasn’t good enough. That was an extra motivation: can I do something else?”

Hans Maarten’s teammates included future world silver medallist Willem Jan Atsma and his brother Douwe Atsma, 1980 Olympian Rob Robbers, and Ronald Florijn. Florijn achieved huge international success including two Olympic titles (1988 and 1996) and five world medals (1978 to 1995), as have his Olympic champion children Karolien (2024) and Finn (2024).

Hans Maarten’s enthusiasm for rowing is still radiant. For him the pair is the queen’s number (“het koninginnennummer”), by which he means the next best boat to the eight. “There’s a lot of excitement in the eight but the coxless pair is about balance. It is the finest way of rowing: difficult to master but heaven when it’s going well.” He especially loves rowing on the River Amstel: “Beautiful and such a pleasure to row. Even Rembrandt sketched and made etchings of it, and it still looks the same more or less”.

Many of the well-crafted lines in the book could only have been written by a rower. I remind Hans Maarten of his description of Anton’s first strokes sat in the stroke seat. “I hope you can see that when I was writing that down, obviously drawing on my own experiences, that I was not thinking, ‘Oh this is very interesting for the reader’, but it turns out it was, or rather the whole story was.” The physicality, exultation and terror of competition is also well captured. “People who have competed know that feeling of exhaustion or the absolute terror in the minutes before the start.”

An early hurdle for Hans Maarten was developing a plot. “Happiness: it’s sort of a lump which you can only describe in mystical terms. I needed some dramatic touches.” His characters came to him while cycling by the river, prompted by Amsterdam School housing blocks. “I saw striking architecture on one side of the river. It is beautiful on the outside, but how would it be to live inside one? The rooms are tiny: don’t you feel constricted? Well, that was the story. Two people from different strata of society who come together and train for a race that will never take place.”

The story is hugely enhanced by its historical undercurrent. “All those boathouses on the River Amstel were destroyed in 1944 because the Nazis said we have to have a free shooting field whenever the Canadians or Americans come, which sounds crazy but it is true. One of the boathouses was confiscated and used by SS officers. In the case of De Hoop the boats were hidden in the attics of the great houses along the canals of Amsterdam.” Hans Maarten’s other books overflow with detail, but not this one. “It needed to be sparse. I don’t want you to wander off and not concentrate on the central theme which is the happiness of rowing.”

What remains unsaid only heightens the dramatic tension. The cancellation of the Olympics and the spectre of war lurk in the shadows as the reader watches Anton’s life unfurl. “That’s a matter of technique. The Second World War is so well documented, everybody knows the pictures and the films etcetera that you only have to touch it lightly and in the mind of the reader décor unrolls. I wanted to have as the centre of the story the two boys, not the history of the Second World War.”

Of Dr. Alfred Schneiderhahn, the coach in the story, Hans Maarten says, “There is a suggestion that he had a pair at the 1936 Olympics in Germany but that he had to stop coaching them. He’s obviously someone who’s been expelled from Germany and come to the Netherlands. There were a lot of Germans in exile in the late 1930s: not only Jewish but for political reasons too. And he goes, in the summer, to the south of France and that’s where a lot of writers and politicians in exile went”.

“Sometimes as a writer you do things just for pleasure, drop hints that readers will not notice,” says Hans Maarten. “The hotel where the coach stays, it is not famous but it is the hotel where the great Austrian writer Joseph Roth stayed while in exile. I used it. Nobody has ever noticed but it was fun to do. Roth was very famous, he drank a lot, he eventually drank himself to death in Paris.”

Anton’s parents seem like figures painted by English artist L.S. Lowry, albeit Dutch ones. Deliberately insipid and paper-thin they function only to prop up the protagonist’s backstory. “They’re not very important,” says Hans Maarten. “They’re afraid: afraid to be noticed and afraid to step over the line. They’re so happy to have a house they’d rather stay inside of it.”

Anton’s father works for the city’s tram company. “He isn’t going around the city in a tram. He stays in the depot, a shady and dark place.” I ask Hans Maarten about his own father, a psychologist at a psychiatric institution who left the family when Hans Maarten was ten years old. “My father was more of an adventurer – so he left. That’s completely the opposite [to the father character in the book].” 

While proofing the text Hans Maarten decided the mother was too absent. A new scene occurred to him as he was searching the city archives for a cover picture. “I was looking at a stash of pictures of the River Amstel from when they were building a bridge. They needed a lot of sand so there was a temporary beach and a lot of kids were playing on it.”

It sparked an idea for his story. “What if this is his first breach of what they do in the household. He wades in the river. Maybe he’s a small boy so his mother is with him and something happens. Her reaction is dead scared: ‘I’ve let my son in the river and now I am being punished for it’. I put that chapter in very late.”

Our conversation turns away from the book. Hans Maarten is in the midst of reporting on the German elections. “It keeps me alert,” he says bright-eyed, while assuring me he’s retired. “I’ve just got into it again, made myself useful since the world is such a mess.” He has the look of a curious-minded journalist who’ll never be quite satisfied. The day’s column inches are devoted to soaring gold prices and volatile stock markets. “I’m so glad I’m not rich,” Hans Maarten says dryly. “I don’t have to worry about that.”

His professional life took root after he dropped out of his literature degree at Leiden University. “I spent two years as a taxi driver – which was addictive but not healthy – before working for the university weekly newspaper.” The stopgap proved worthy of an extension. “It was so much fun making a newspaper that I never looked back. I thought I’d make another life choice before turning 30, but I never did.”

I circle back to ‘Hans Maarten the taxi driver’. What appealed and why was it addictive? “I was young, about 20 years old. It was the big cars, working at night and always having a stash of money with you,” he chuckles. “Ridiculous!”

Later Hans Maarten worked for NRC Handelsblad, a Dutch daily newspaper. Over 13 years, he worked as their correspondent in the USA during the Reagan era, in Spain (which spawned a book on bullfighting and gave him the opportunity to work for three weeks as a full-time sportswriter at the Olympic Games in Barcelona), and did reporting on China during the Tiananmen Square crisis and on the Middle East. He was, “partly embedded, partly on my own” in the Gulf War as he reported on Operation Desert Storm, the US-led liberation of Kuwait in 1991.

“There’s a lot of boring episodes covering a war. Nothing happens. A lot of colleagues said no, but I was not particularly scared of things, so I just went.  It was interesting, exciting and scary, but not for me. As a trade it’s…” Hans Maarten pauses. “You meet them in hotel bars and in Amann and in Iraq and Baghdad – I think it’s unhealthy for your body but especially for your mind. I wouldn’t advise my kids to become war journalists.”

Competition has spurred much of Hans Maarten’s own path. “The thing about being competitive is you tend to compete even when it comes to things that don’t matter at all. It has cost me,” he says. “You have to have a bit more peace of mind than I did, to live a more orderly life. People who reach great heights in whatever they do are very focussed,” he smiles, “I guess I’m not very focussed”.

“There is a scene where Anton looks in the mirror and sees himself – his body – and thinks I can do anything. That’s what I mean by loving yourself and accepting yourself. I must say, that’s a feeling I had when was 19 or so. It was all going so well and I thought I could do anything; and I could.”

“It’s over now, by the way.”

H.M. van den Brink will be speaking at Leander Club on Thursday March 27, 2025.