Bruges-la-Morte: Georges Rodenbach (Dedalus European Classics) [Paperback]

Georges Rodenbach (Author), Will Stone (Photographer), Mike Mitchell (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Dedalus European Classics | Publication Date: January 10, 2010

A tale of obsession set against the melancholy of Bruges.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This is a book which is not only richly, almost oppressively, atmospheric: it is about atmosphere, about how a city can be a state of mind as well as a geographical entity. It has its shocks and its melodrama: but it is a haunting, and a haunted work.." Nick Lezard inThe Guardian

" a Symbolist vision of the city that lays the way for Aragon and Joyce, and a macabre story of obsessive love and transfiguring horror .This is a little masterpiece." Scotland on Sunday

" The translators remain faithful to the substance and style of the original, and Alan Hollinghurst's introduction is stimulating and heartfelt, explaining Rodenbach's idiosyncrasies without apologizing for them." Daniel Starza-Smith in The Times Literary Supplement

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Every evening Hugues retraced the same route, following the line of the quais. His gait was uncertain, slightly hunched already, even though he was only forty. But widowhood had brought an early autumn. His hair was receding, with a copious scattering of grey ash. His faded eyes were fixed on a distant point, a very distant point, beyond life itself. And how melancholy Bruges was, too, during those late afternoons! That was how he liked the town! It was for its melancholy that he had chosen it and had gone to live there after the great catastrophe. In those happy times when he was travelling round with his wife, living as his fancy took him, a somewhat cosmopolitan life, in Paris, abroad, by the sea, he had passed through the town with her, but its profound melancholy had not had the power to affect their joy. Later on however, once he was alone, he had remembered Bruges and had immediately and instinctively known he must settle there. A mysterious equation gradually established itself. He needed a dead town to correspond to his dead wife. His deep mourning demanded such a setting. Life would only be bearable for him there. It was instinct that had brought him here. He would leave the world elsewhere to its bustle and buzz, to its glittering balls, its welter of voices. He needed infinite silence and an existence that was so monotonous it almost failed to give him the sense of being alive. In the presence of physical pain, why must we keep silent, tread softly in a sickroom? Why do noises, voices, seem to disturb the dressing and reopen the wound? Those suffering from mental anguish can be hurt by noise too. In the muted atmosphere of the waterways and the deserted streets, Hugues was less sensitive to the sufferings of his heart, his thoughts of his dead wife were less painful. He had seen her, heard her again more clearly, finding the face of his departed Ophelia as he followed the canals, hearing her voice in the thin, distant song of the bells. In this way the town, once beautiful and beloved too, embodied the loss he felt. Bruges was his dead wife. And his dead wife was Bruges. The two were united in a like destiny. It was Bruges-la-Morte, the dead town entombed in its stone quais, with the arteries of its canals cold once the great pulse of the sea had ceased beating in them.

Product Details

• Paperback: 166 pages
• Publisher: Dedalus Limited; 2nd edition (January 10, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1903517826
• ISBN-13: 978-1903517826
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #362,489 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Symbolist Jewel, December 18, 2011

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Maryevelyn "a reader" (St. Charles, IL) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Bruges-la-Morte: Georges Rodenbach (Dedalus European Classics) (Paperback)

I had never heard of the Flemish (he wrote in French) Belgian poet/novelist Georges Rodenbach until I read an article about him in the Review section of the weekend edition of the "Wall Street Journal" a couple of weeks ago. I was particularly struck by the picture which the paper reproduced of the 1890 portrait of Rodenbach by Lucien Levy-Dhurmer. It's the face and shoulders of a pale blond sad youngish man in an open-neck shirt with the misty, medieval city of Bruges in the background. It's a compelling portrait but less a portrait of Rodenbach than it is of the protagonist of "Bruges la Morte," the widower Hugues Viane. Rodenbach was a symbolist author. According to the British poet and translator of Rodenbach's essay "The Death Throes of Towns" appended at the end of the novel, "Melancholy, solitude, morbidity, neuropathic tendencies and unresolved longing for an imagined past are all classic hallmarks of the symbolist mindset." "Bruges la Morte" is all of these and more. It is a story of Hugues Viane who chose to live in Bruges following the premature death of his wife, with whom he was very much in love, because it was a "dead town." "His deep mourning demanded such a setting. Life would only be bearable for him there. . . . He needed infinite silence and an existence that was so monotonous it almost failed to give him the sense of being alive." He has turned his grief for his wife (we are never told her name) into a religious cult. He keeps a room in his large house devoted to her relics, especially the long golden braid of hair which he cut off after she died and keeps in a locked glass reliquary. He visits the room every morning touching and kissing the photos and other objects, except the hair, as if they were the relics of a dead saint and he could be sanctified by them. Viane wanders through the town every evening thinking of his dead wife. On one of the walks he sees a woman who looks exactly like her, Jane Scott. He follows her and eventurally discovers she is an opera dancer. The plot of this short novel is the working out of the deeply disturbing relationship between Hugues and Jane. The affair violates the morals of this pious pre-Vatican II provincial Catholic town. ". . . the gables shaped like mitres, the streets adorned with Madonnas, the wind filled with the sound of bells -- an example of piety and austerity streamed towards Hugues, the influence of a Catholicism ingrained in the very air and the stones." There is so much beauty in this novel -- the close observation that underlies the description of Bruges' quais, the canals, the swans, the churches their bells and the great art to be found in their interiors funded by the wealth of nobles from the era of its greatness during the High Middle Ages, the gossips of the town who have attached mirrors to the outside of their windows so they can sit inside their houses and observe the goings on of the street reflected in these mirrors without themselves being observed, and above all the community of convents of the Beguinage and its fantastically dressed nuns, which is itself a town within a town. This is a very fine novel which evokes a time, place and culture very much like the finest travel writers. While reading it I couldn't help thinking of Colin Thubron's book "To a Mountain in Tibet" which is the story of his assent of a mountain sacred to Buddhism and Hinduism and is infused with thoughts of death and solitude. Hugues has written a work of art. I hope more people will read and appreciate it.