Jacques Northe (ps. of Jacques Sitter) was born in Amsterdam in 1934. After studying history in the 1950’s he worked in theater, film and opera in cities as Berlin, Zürich and Paris. In 1974 Northe self-published the first part of his opinionated and meandering debut novel Amortisatie (Amortization) in a stenciled edition of 150. Fragments of the manuscript Wenk (Hint) were published in Raster and in the Flemish magazine Heibel. Subsequently little was heard of the writer who so promisingly entered the sphere of literature.
His work was rediscovered in 2010 by writer and photographer Lucas Hügsen. Through his efforts the first complete publication of Amortization has been realized.
Amortization is about a certain Waldemar, in whose estate an unfinished manuscript is found on a committee issuing a liber amicorum on the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. That story, with its numerous cultural and political ramifications, is so bizarre that an unnamed introducer, vaguely reminiscent of Charles Kinbote in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, feels the need to annotate the text and provide comments.