Tag Archives: Flemish

Book of the month: Hugo Claus

October 31, 2024 By in Book of the month, Europe, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

A few weeks ago, I found myself having lunch next to the Belgian author David Van Reybrouck. We were in the writers’ room at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, where he had just taken part in a panel discussion on the end of empire, drawing on his Baillie Gifford Prize-shortlisted book Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, translated by David Colmer and David McKay.

When I explained my role as the festival’s literary explorer in residence and how it had come out of this project and my first book, Reading the World, he exclaimed: ‘I just had that book in my hand!’ It turned out he had picked it up in the festival’s bookshop and checked the list at the back to see what I had chosen for Belgium. ‘You picked a French-language writer I’ve never heard of!’ he said with a mischievous smile.

More than twelve years after I set out to read the world, it was clearly high time I ventured into Flemish literature. So I asked what he would recommend.

According to Van Reybrouck and to the blurb on the back of my 1991 Penguin edition, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans, Hugo Claus’s The Sorrow of Belgium (first published in 1983) is one of its homeland’s most important novels. Set in Flanders between 1939 and 1947, it follows the coming of age of Louis Seynaeve, whose family collaborates with the Germans during the Occupation. Through the unfolding of tortured domestic relationships, it reveals the national and cultural cost of betrayal, brutality and war.

It’s easy to see why The Sorrow of Belgium appeals to Van Reybrouck, whose Revolusi I was listening to while I read this novel. Both books find ingenious ways to pleat together the personal and the political: while Revolusi interweaves extraordinary eyewitness testimony with wide-ranging historical analysis, The Sorrow of Belgium uses intimate, personal details to reveal the psychological cost of occupation and domination. As Louis obsesses over his father’s secret stash of toffees, navigates a series of disturbing early sexual encounters and steers his way through fraught relationships with the nuns and priests in charge of his education, we see the isolation and insecurity that the horrors unfolding largely offstage have wrought in him.

The book captures the tedium and pettiness that can characterise the everyday experience of momentous historical events (as many of us may have found during the pandemic). ‘The only thing you went through [during the Occupation] was making sure you got enough food and clothes and coal,’ Louis tells his mother. This both is and isn’t true: we see all the characters shaped and changed by international events. Although their reality may be measured out in the availability of provisions and snippets of local gossip, the pressure they are under is always evident, coming out in surprising, disturbing and sometimes amusing ways.

Language and storytelling are constant themes. Louis’s father rails against French speakers, while, at the start of the novel, Louis and his boarding school chums make the sharing of so-called ‘banned books’ a condition for admittance into their secret club of Apostles. Even before the Occupation and certainly during it the narrative seems to hum with an awareness of what may or may not be said, and the form of language acceptable.

The Penguin edition adds an extra layer to this. ‘The people of Flanders speak Flemish, a variant of Dutch which is distinguished from the version spoken in the Netherlands by minor differences in accent and vocabulary only,’ writes Arnold J. Pomerans in his ‘Translator’s Note’. The edition proclaims that it is translated from the Dutch, and the blurb even trumpets The Sorrow of Belgium as ‘the most important Dutch novel to have been published since the war’. All of which leaves a reader like me wondering what Claus – whose work has so much to say about language and how it relates to identity, and who is widely described as a Flemish writer – may have made of this. Would he have agreed with Pomerans’s assertion that the differences between Flemish and Dutch are so slight as to be negligible? Did he in fact write this book in Dutch? Or is this an example of an English-language publisher not wanting to risk putting readers off with too much intimidating detail? Would a novel billed as translated from Flemish (if that is what this is) have been a tougher sell?

Language use in the novel is fascinating in other ways too. The narrative bends to explore the limits of subjectivity, diving in and out of Louis’s consciousness so that we are often uncertain how much veracity to accord events. In a manner reminiscent of anglophone modernist greats such as James Joyce, Claus excels at depicting the partial, fragmentary nature of experience and perception. This is something that Louis, himself an aspiring writer, laments:

‘He failed to see connections between things, that was true. For one reason or another he found this proof of his inability to recognise the basis, no, the very structure of things, incredibly depressing. He swore all the way back home. Others were able to gain an immediate, coherent, rational picture of complex, fragmented objects, facts, incidents all around them, but not he, no matter how hard he tried, but then he didn’t try very hard, because he didn’t know how to.’

Yet what seems to Louis to be a failing is, Claus shows us, the reality of human experience. There is often greater honesty in scraps and fleeting impressions than in neat, coherent accounts. The desires and messiness of the body (often described in vivid detail) are more truthful than the high-flown, impenetrable rhetoric that figures such as Louis’s troubled mentor Rock deliver to classrooms of bemused schoolboys.

The personal is political, Claus and Van Reybrouck show us in their different ways, because it is often the best way we can appreciate what has happened. Patchy and flawed though this appreciation may be, it is necessary to keep us conscious of the distance we have travelled. Our grasp on reality is often feeble and fumbling. That is why we need storytelling.

The Sorrow of Belgium by Hugo Claus, translated from the Dutch (Flemish?) by Arnold J. Pomerans (Penguin, 1991)

Book of the month: Saskia De Coster

October 31, 2016 By in Book of the month, Europe Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

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Moving house is a chance to reflect on many things. As I wrote in my post about packing up my year of reading the world bookshelf, my recent change of address led me to ponder this project and the many different people and ideas to which it introduced me anew.

I also found that it reintroduced me to a lot of other books – not least some of the many volumes on my to-read mountain. Since 2012, this has grown to a massive size. Barely a days goes by without someone contacting me or leaving a comment here suggesting another intriguing book.

Publishers are no exception. I often get emails from presses keen to send me copies of their latest releases in the hope that I might write about them on this blog. I’m always glad to hear about great books, but I’m also very honest with companies that contact me like this: because I only choose one book to feature each month, I am unlikely to review most of the books publishers send me. Indeed, I can count on one hand the number of review copies I have written about here.

Still, last month, as I was packing up, I happened upon an uncorrected proof sent to me by World Editions earlier this year. It was for the English-language version of Wij en ik (We and Me) by Belgian writer Saskia De Coster, translated from the Dutch by Nancy Forest-Flier.

The accompanying publicity material was impressive. This was, according to World Editions, ‘a brilliant, incisive novel’. Indeed, they went so far as to call it a European response to Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

If that weren’t curiosity-piquing enough, the cover of the proof bore a ringing endorsement from Dutch author Herman Koch, whose Summer House with Swimming Pool I read recently and enjoyed. And so, taking the book up from the stack on which it had languished for half a year, I put the packing on hold for a bit and began to read.

The novel follows the fortunes of the Vandersanden family, spanning more than three decades from 1980 until almost present-day. Living in a housing estate high up a mountain, megalomaniac Mieke, her taciturn husband Stefaan and their increasingly wilful and non-communicative daughter Sarah move through their days in isolation, caught in a web of silence that threatens to strangle them all. Through their stories and those of the community around them, De Coster paints a devastating picture of the modern-day nuclear family, revealing how loneliness can be threaded through the most intimate relationships of all.

The comparison of De Coster to Franzen is understandable, but somewhat limited. Although the two share an expansiveness to their writing and a willingness to devote pages to teasing out minutiae that most writers would baulk at for fear of readers’ ever-shrinking attention spans, the Belgian author’s prose has a quality all its own.

At her best she gets inside the heads of her characters to the extent that the whole world and the images used to portray it are coloured and slanted by their specific neuroses and concerns. When we look through the eyes of Mieke – whose days consist of an obsessional round of domestic chores – life explains itself by way of housework metaphors, whereas increasingly paranoid Stefaan sees reality in terms of political plots and intrigues.

There are some lovely instances of humour too. De Coster delights in bathos, frequently undercutting her creations’ pretensions or delusions with sharp one-liners that stay just the right side of bitter.

In time, however, this falls away and in the second half of the book the narrative takes flight, steering an exhilarating course between the peaks and valleys of the emotional landscape, revealing stunning vistas and terrifying cliffs.

This is not a perfect novel. There are some clunky word choices and overworked imagery. Observations such as the would-be bon mot that ‘rain in Belgium is like the great leader in a dictatorship: it pops up everywhere’ feel laboured and unnecessary.

At times the pacing jolts, jerking us abruptly from one scene to the next. And although the shifts of perspective from one character’s mind to the next often feel natural and fluid, there are points at which they bewilder.

The biggest issue concerns the mysterious ‘we’ of the title – a strange disembodied consciousness that creeps into the story at odd moments, commenting on the action in the manner of a Greek chorus. Although this occasionally adds a nice sense of mystery, it is not developed enough to merit its place and feels rather like scaffolding that may have helped in the construction of the narrative but would have been best taken down to show off the finished work.

These near misses are symptomatic of the risks writers must take to do exciting, new things, however. And there can be no doubt that, for all its imperfections, this is a bold and daring book. The epigraph from Virginia Woolf is a key to De Coster’s ambitions for her story: ‘To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face.’

For my money, she has achieved this. Uneven though it may be, We and Me contains startling truths about the way we live and die. To read this story is to be changed by it.

Thanks for sending me the proof, World Editions. I wonder what other delights are lurking in my mountains of unread books…

We and Me (Wij en ik) by Saskia De Coster, translated from the Dutch by Nancy Forest-Flier (World Editions, 2016)

By the way, it’s been great to see such a brilliant response to Postcards from my bookshelf – nearly 120 entries in the week since it went live. If you haven’t applied yet but would like to be in with a chance of receiving a book chosen by me next year, visit the post and leave a comment telling me a bit about you and what you like to read.