“No book published in the last 10 years has had a bigger impact on me, one of those books that speaks directly to your gut, a revelation. … [T]here’s something unclassifiable about the way Nescio goes about his stories, as if every sentence is a surprise even to the writer. At the same time, there’s nobody less pretentious and more down-to-earth.”- LitHub’s “26 Books from the Last Decade that More People Should Read”
“His utter simplicity goes hand-in-hand with a great command of humour, irony, matter-of-factness, understatement and sentiment (never sentimentality or self-pity) all of which miraculously balance each other out. ... Nescio is essentially a lyricist, a poet writing in prose.” - Dutch Foundation for Literature
“No one has written more feelingly and more beautifully than Nescio about the madness and sadness, courage and vulnerability of youth: its big plans and vague longings, not to mention the binges, crashes, and marathon walks and talks. No one, for that matter, has written with such pristine clarity about the radiating canals of Amsterdam and the cloud-swept landscape of the Netherlands.
Who was Nescio? Nescio—Latin for ‘I don’t know’—was the pen name of J.H.F. Grönloh, the highly successful director of the Holland–Bombay Trading Company and a father of four—someone who knew more than enough about respectable maturity. Only in his spare time and under the cover of a pseudonym, as if commemorating a lost self, did he let himself go, producing over the course of his lifetime a handful of utterly original stories that contain some of the most luminous pages in modern literature.”