Keefman is a collection of short stories by Jan Arends. Little biographical information is known about Jan Arends. He was born on February 13, 1925 in The Hague as an illegitimate child of Gerardina Arends. His mother suffered from rheumatism at an early age, so he was soon sent to a strict Catholic boarding school and trained as a cobbler. Arends wandered through Europe and practiced all kinds of professions, but the most striking ones are the domestic servant and copywriter. He gave a controversial interview to Dick van de Pol in the magazine Vrij Nederland in 1972 about his crazy life and experiences as a servant (Aarts and Wierema 1979: 91-102). His oeuvre consists mainly of prose in short stories and poetry.

A special issue of the journal De Engelbewaarder (1979) collected contributions from literati who all kept memories of Jan Arends and this issue also contextualizes Arends' life course and to a lesser extent his work. In the contribution application, Rudi Kousbroek has gone furthest in his praise for Arends and feels that his work is worthy of a Nobel Prize, especially the story Vrijgezel op Kamers (Bachelor in a room) He compares his work with the Grand Master of the short story in the Netherlands, J.M.A. Biesheuvel, but besides the thematic analogy in the stories that take place in the background of the asylum (the psychiatric institution) he finds no common ground. At the same time he makes the comparison with a French or Russian major author. He concludes that Arends' work is truly original in the sense that it is universal and his literature does not depict the inevitable, the fateful, in a language that is without frills. Joop Waasdorp, according to his appearance, calls him an eccentric figure, someone who could have run away from a story by the Russian writer Gogoľ (Aarts and Wierema 1979: 112-113, 129).

Arends was a phenomenon in Dutch literature because he wrote during his various stays in psychiatric institutions. He died in 1974 when he jumped out of a window and committed suicide. In addition to prose and the copywriting he did professionally, Arends also wrote poetry. A collection of collected works was published by the Bezige Bij publishing house in 1994. He also lives on in the popular culture of the Low Countries, the popular singer Frank Boeijen wrote a song about him, de Prijs (van Jan Arends) and the Flemish singer-songwriter Kris de Bruyne composed his poem Lieve Jacoba (Dear Jacoba) on music.

Adam Bžoch, in his afterword to Keefman's translation (2020: 116-117), highlights the theme of antipsychiatry, in which Arends' short stories drew attention to the problems of the mentally ill. People had become skeptical of heavy medication for patients and of confinement in institutions, and had started to pay more attention to the creative sides of their imaginary worlds. Although his short stories are nevertheless primarily associated with his own world and experiences as if they were ego-documents, there are, for example, similarities with other literary works. We have in this case the Russian authors already mentioned: indeed, the character of the lower, troubled Russian official from the Jacket (or. Russian Šineľ) or the character meeting his own nose taking a carriage ride in the Nose (or. Russian: Nos) from Nikolai Gogoľ's Peterburg Tales is a motif that is very similar. Bžoch also mentions the similarity to the narrative style in Franz Kafka's short stories, with Arends parodying the themes of Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), Vor dem Gesetz (Before the Law) and Ein Bericht für eine Akademie (A report to an academy) mainly in the short stories Vrijgezel op Kamers (Bachelor in the Room), De Weldoener (The Benefactor) and Het ontbijt (The Breakfast), managing to copy both their mythological and religious pathos.