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In Het ware leven, een roman (Real Life. A Novel, 2006) he set out to play a game with world literature. La Superba (2014) showed Pfeijffer’s politically engaged side and won him the Libris Literature Prize. In 2017 his novel Peachez, een romance came out, followed, in 2018, by his bestselling novel Grand Hotel Europa, which sold over 350,000 copies in the Netherlands and has been translated into 24 languages. Alcibiades (2023) is his first work of historical fiction.

Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer

This news article inspired Leonard Pfeijffer to write Peachez. A Romance, which is completely fictional. All the motives, reflections and contemplations of the tragic hero, a professor of Classical Languages – the subject in which Pfeijffer gained his own doctorate – sprang from the rampant imagination of the author. As did the character with whom the professor falls torridly in love: Sarah Peachez. There is an erotic model who goes by that name on the internet, but she will not have the slightest notion of the role allotted to her by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer.The romance between the academic and the girl originates in their email correspondence. His digital letters are erudite and sophisticated, saturated with the poetry of Horace and Catullus, analytical, instructive. Hers – that is, those of the people hiding behind her – are refreshing, playful, challenging and disarming. It is a courtship between lovers from two mutually exclusive worlds, yet they come together, as in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, or, for other reasons, Nabokov’s Lolita.Although you know that the professor is becoming hopelessly entangled in the web, you continue to follow him and support his desire for real love. You long for him to find his impossible happiness. You want nothing more than to believe Sarah Peachez exists, that she really does write such enchanting missives, loves him, and is waiting for him somewhere.

The power of this book lies not in its eloquent style, nor the painful finale, but in the passionate plea the writer makes for an unconditional belief in love. […] 'Peachez' is already the most romantic book of the year.

Which is clearly not the case. From the very start you know that it will all end badly. In the opening pages the professor is in jail. But the surprising thing is this: in the eloquent report of what has happened to him he expresses no resentment or spite. On the contrary. He admits his guilt and accepts his fate, even if it means he will die behind bars. Because at least he really did live and love, once in his life.Peachez. A romance is not just a tantalizing and tense thriller but a small philosophical novel about faith and love.

We can count ourselves lucky with such an analytical spirit, who not only creates literature from ideas with palpable ease, but also has a mild perspective on mankind […] That mildness is a form of courage.

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Peachez, een romance

‘The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble’ ran the headline in 'The New York Times' in 2013, above an article about an Oxford professor of particle physics, Paul Frampton, who became the victim of ‘catfishing’. Surfing the internet, the physicist allowed himself to be tempted into committing a criminal offence by a busty photo model. At least, so he thought. Behind the model lurked a criminal cyber gang.

Peachez. A Romance

Alcibiades (ca. 450-404 BCE) lived during turbulent times when the city-states of Athens and Sparta were at war. He grew up as a member of the privileged elite in Athens. At a young age he grew influential within the democratic assembly that met on the Pnyx. As the resident consul for Sparta he forged important diplomatic relationships.After several minor triumphs on the battlefield, Alcibiades became convinced that he had to expand the Greek empire westward. He’d barely set off to conquer Sicily when a smear campaign against him was launched in Athens. He was convicted and sentenced to death. This is just the first of a series of narrow escapes, glorious triumphs and painful defeats, in the process of which he ventures into the depths of Persia.Pfeijffer portrays his protagonist as a cunning strategist with a knack for getting out of trouble. This book is an adventure novel as well as an apologia written by Alcibiades at the end of his life to defend himself against the accusations of treason and abuse of power. In everything he did, he argues, his ultimate goal was to restore Athenian democracy to its former glory. Pfeijffer leaves it up to the reader to decide how trustworthy and noble Alcibiades’ intentions actually are. But his concerns about the well-being of democracy in the face of threats from populist politicians are sure to resonate with contemporary European readers.

‘The most ambitious historical novel to appear in the Dutch-speaking world to date.’

‘Pfeijffer immerses readers in a world so vivid and rich in detail that it is wholly convincing.’

Alkibiades

'Alcibiades' is a sweeping epic about the eponymous diplomat, general, Olympic champion and ‘most beautiful man in Athens’, who uses schemes and plots to bluff his way through the Peloponnesian War. This novel sheds light on the daring democratic experiment that took place two and a half millennia ago, while also serving as a cautionary tale about the destructive power of populism. Classicist and author Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer has utilised his erudition and knowledge of Classical literature and culture to paint a picture of the Greek politician, strategist and general Alcibiades in all his complexity.

Alcibiades

Among these are the major-domo, who always speaks in complete sentences, the feminist poet, Albane, the congenial bellboy, Abdul, and the intellectual, Patelski. Ever since the hotel was bought by the Chinese millionaire, Mr Wang, there have been plastic flowers in the antique vases and disco lights in the chandelier. The tension between the representatives of Old Europe and the new world reach a climax when the major-domo is fired.The clash between tradition and modernization played a decisive role in the end of Ilja and Clio’s relationship as well. A classicist like Ilja sees nothing but the beauty of Old Europe, whereas Clio laments that a country like Italy is strangled by the past. This sentiment compels her to take a job at the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi, but Ilja – a European in his heart and soul – refuses to go with her.Ilja is enraged by the fact that Europe is becoming a giant theme park, Venice being one frightening example. He contends that beauty and an illustrious past alone are no longer relevant: ‘I don’t want to have to conclude that, like the hotel I’m staying in and the continent it’s named after, my best years are behind me and that my only real prospect for the future is to live off my past.’ Still, the book is anything but sombre – Pfeijffer is too witty for that. At the end, when the main character decides to follow Clio to Abu Dhabi, the reader is left with the hope that he can still reconcile his muse and his beloved continent.Just like Pfeijffer’s previous novel, La Superba, this book addresses central themes such as tourism, globalization and the refugee crisis. Its stylistic variety is striking: in the hotel, the characters speak in flowery, old-fashioned prose, whereas the language used to describe Ilja’s relationship with Clio is poetic and sensual. What’s more, an exciting, Dan Brown-style subplot emerges when the author and his girlfriend go off in search of a lost painting by Caravaggio. Along the way, the book offers essay-like elaborations on Venice, Skopje and the excesses of mass tourism. With this ingenious juxtaposition of styles and themes, Pfeijffer makes a stunning literary plea for Europe. Grand Hotel Europa is truly a Great European Novel.

Despite the loaded subject, his great European novel is a page-turner.

You should put 'Grand Hotel Europa' by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer on the shelf next to Europe books by Thomas Mann and Harry Mulisch. Rarely have we read a novel that ingeniously links a tragic but beautiful love story with serious, but never dull, often witty reflections on the phenomenon that is Europe. […] 'Grand Hotel Europa' is a love letter to an old beloved, a dead-tired but stunning continent.’

Grand Hotel Europa

An author by the name of Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer leaves Venice and moves into the stately Grand Hotel Europa for an indefinite period. His relationship with Clio, a clever hot-blooded art historian, has just fallen apart. In the hotel, where a sense of long-lost glory hangs in the air, he reconstructs exactly what went wrong with Clio and befriends the eccentric hotel staff and guests along the way.

‘Emigrating is like writing a new novel, without yet knowing the plot, the ending, nor even the characters that will turn out to be crucial to the progress of the story,’ says Ilja Leonardo Pfeijffer, the self-confident ‘Italophile’ who addresses us in La Superba. In a long letter home he reports on his life as an explorer in Genoa and contrasts his fate with that of the dirt poor migrant workers from Africa who can barely keep their heads above water.La Superba is more than a touching story about fortune seekers who fall through the cracks. The novel starts with the discovery, by the narrator, of a woman’s leg on the street. That leg will pop up repeatedly in his search for ‘the most beautiful girl in Genoa’, a quest that brings him into contact with the prostitutes, locals and outsiders of the port’s rougher districts and seaman’s bars. This is a pocket edition of Dante’s Inferno, written by an author who admits that he likes to exaggerate: ‘Let’s call it an exercise in style. But the fact that I exaggerate doesn’t mean what I say is untrue.’Eventually the main character becomes hopelessly lost in his own fantasies, leaving his readers with the feeling they have been hallucinating while roaming through a metropolis. The destination was irrelevant; it was the journey that mattered. And anyone in danger of losing the thread could cling to the style of their guide, to those dynamic sentences full of depravity and high contemplation that Pfeijffer has produced in such quantities since his award-winning debut novel Rupert: A Confession (2002).

<ul><li><a href="http://deepvellum.org/2014/07/16/ilja-leonard-pfeijffer-welcome-to-the-deep-vellum-family/">Deep Vellum Press</a></li></ul>

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It’s witty throughout, it’s well written and it’s an ode to the imagination.

You read his salutary, pleasure-seeking prose to feast upon language. Bravissimo.

La Superba

This novel is set in Genoa, the labyrinthine port city (nicknamed ‘the Superb’) where the author has been living for the past five years. Migration is the central theme of this autobiographical story about a writer who becomes trapped in his walk on the wild side.

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