The Sorrow of Belgium

"Yes, this is a novel that works well in all three languages. It was written in Flemish Dutch. It’s full of Flemish slang and not easily readable—I would suggest—by some people from the Netherlands because it contains quite a lot of loan words from other languages and is full of dialect. Claus was a rather crazy, disorganised 1960s figure, but certainly saw himself as an intellectual. Above all, he saw himself, as many Belgian writers have done, as somebody who had escaped the suffocation of his upbringing by running away to Paris (Georges Simenon might be a similar case). All of that comes through in this complicated novel which operates at all sorts of different levels, but might be most simply described as a coming-of-age novel. It’s about a boy from provincial Flanders and all the ghosts that haunt him—ghosts from the World Wars, religion, and family disputes that have never been resolved. It’s crazy, picaresque writing. It perhaps doesn’t work all the way through, but nobody could read it and not feel that they had acquired a sense of what Belgium was really about. In that sense, he’s the sort of literary equivalent of the songs of Jacques Brel. Yes, it starts in the 1930s. It’s inhabited by issues of Flemish nationalism and collaboration with the Germans. It also makes references back and forwards and it’s a great deal of fun. There are moments when any reader of it can end up a little confused as to what is going on—and perhaps Hugo Claus needed a better editor—but, as a whole, it is an emphatically successful evocation of what it was like to live in that corner of north-western Europe through the middle of the 20th century. Yes, one of the first facts about Belgium is that it is—was?—a very Catholic society. Particularly in provincial Flanders, the weight of Catholic belief, Catholic participation, Catholic influence in education was very, very strong. Belgium was not a secularised society, as a whole. Of course, there were secular currents within it, but Catholicism was a dominant cultural influence right through to the 60s and some would argue since then too. I think you can just plunge into it. It would help to have a certain historical literacy about the two World Wars but once you get into it, you can enjoy it for what it is, as a study of the way in which the values of a wider society impinge upon someone growing up in that society."