It’s Dutch, but the Flemish use words and phrases that are completely unlike what we would use over here. In the second part we learn he wrote the first part, but by then it was too late: the narrator had become too unreliable to really care. What also didn’t really help, is that we find out that Louis is supposed to be the novel’s author. His school work suffers, he enjoys a brief stint in the Flemish branch of the Hitler Youth … sure, having a family that mostly sympathizes with the Germans doesn’t really help, but still: grow a pair. And as soon as he’s pulled from those confines, it goes wrong. In the novel’s first part he’s mostly tolerable as an impressionable eleven-year old, safely tucked away from the tumultuous world with the nuns in a boarding school, but even there he is bossy and cruel. Mostly, I guess, because I found the protagonist, Louis Seynaeve, to be an unsympathetic and insufferable git. It covers a lot of themes - growing up, family, Flemish small-town life, collaboration - as seen through the eyes of an impressionable child. Hugo Claus’s semi-autobiographical Het verdriet van België (The Sorrow of Belgium) is Belgium’s Big and Important Book about World War II. Posted Ap& filed under 40 books before 40, First Lines.
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